MAR   3  1919 


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Division     .S'X 
Section        ^gy^;i^ 


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ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES 


RELIGIOUS,  LITERARY  AND    SOCIAL 


BY 


PHILLIPS    BROOKS 


LATE  BISHOP  OF  MASSACHUSETTS 


EDITED  BY  THE  REV.  JOHN  COTTON  BROOKS 


NEW  YORK 
E.  P.  DUTTON    AND    COMPANY 

31  West  Twenty-third  Street 
1895 


CopjTight,  1894, 
By  E.  P.  BUTTON  &  COMPANY. 


PEEFACE. 


A  GREAT  soul,  like  a  mountain  lake,  appears  at  first 
solitary  in  its  individual  existence  as  it  lies  alone  in  all 
its  beauty  of  depth  and  color,  reflecting  tlie  distant  sky 
above  it.  But,  with  the  lake,  from  dwelling  with  it  and 
growing  daily  familiar  with  its  many  phases,  we  find  that 
it  is  in  the  mountains  which  surround  it  that  its  life  gets 
its  source,  and  that  it  is  from  reflecting  them  also  and 
sympathizing  with  their  changeful  experiences,  and  fur- 
nishing a  pathway  from  one  to  other  of  them  that  its 
beauty  and  its  value  are  gained.  So  in  its  capacity  both 
to  receive  and  to  contribute  to  the  life  about  it  lies  the 
secret  power  of  attraction  which  we  feel  in  such  a  soul. 

This  book  is  a  loving  attempt  to  exemplify  this  truth 
in  the  case  of  one  who,  while  wonderfully  beautiful  and 
grand  in  his  o\^^l  sublime  and  solitary  self  in  communion 
with  things  above,  yet  was  the  embodiment  of  human 
sympathy,  who  lived  not  only  for  the  life  of  mankind, 
but  in  and  by  that  life  also,  drawing  his  own  ever-fresh 
life  from  it,  reflecting  its  joys  and  sorrows  in  his  own 
clear  depths,  and  bringing  each  part  of  it  closer  to  every 
other  by  his  many-sidedness  and  breadth  which  touched 
and  watered  all. 

How  real  this  truth  was  to  him  his  own  words,  taken 
almost  at  random,  tell  us :  ^'  In  every  department  of  life, 
whether  I  look  at  politics,  at  government,  at  social  life, 
and  the  relation  of  ethics  thereto,  whether  I  look  at  reli- 


IV  PREFACE. 

gion,  tliere  is  only  one  word  that  expresses  the  cord  that 
binds  the  human  race :  that  word  is  synlpath3^  Present 
and  past  religion  seems  to  have  been  developing  conditions 
under  which  s^nnpathy  might  work.  The  characteristic 
word  of  the  past  hundred  years  has  been  liberty.  Liberty 
is  a  negative  term ;  the  removal  of  obstacles,  the  setting 
free  of  conditions  under  which  the  essential  and  absolute 
and  positive  power  of  sj^mpathy,  of  the  relation  of  man 
to  man  under  the  recognition  of  their  brotherhood,  should 
find  its  place  and  expression." 

The  collection  of  Essaj's  and  Addresses  here  presented 
comprises  all  of  which  any  record  at  all  satisfactory  has 
been  preserved  of  Bishop  Brooks's  pubhc  utterances  out- 
side of  the  pulpit.  Of  necessity  some  are  given  in  more 
or  less  fragmentary  sliape  as  they  were  taken  directly 
from  his  lijis,  but  these  retain  more  even  than  the  rest  the 
peculiarly  forcible  forms  of  his  extemporaneous  expres- 
sion, so  familiar  to  his  friends,  and  so  much  a  part  of 
himself.  The  chronological  sequence  has  been  observed 
as  far  as  possible  as  illustrating  in  an  interesting  manner 
the  development  of  his  thought. 

The  indebtedness  of  the  editor  is  gratefully  acknow- 
ledged for  cordial  permission  for  the  use  of  copyright,  to 
the  Boston  Latin  School  Association,  the  trustees  of  Phil- 
lips Exeter  Academy,  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co.,  Ticknor  & 
Co.,  the  Princeton  Review,  Bishop  John  H.  Vincent,  and 
Professor  A.  E.  Winship. 

Christ  Church  Eectory, 

Springfield,  Mass.,  July,  1894. 


J.  C.  B. 


CO^TEl^TS. 


ON  RELIGIOUS  TOPICS. 

PAGE 

^    Essay,  1858.     "  The  Centralizing  Power  of  the  Gospel."     Epis. 

Theolog.  Seminary,  Alexandria,  Va 1 

^  Essay,  October,  1873.     "Heresy."    Clericus  Club,  Boston,  Mass.       7 
'^  Essay,  November  12,  1875.     "The  Best  Methods  of  Promoting 
Spiritual  Life."     Second  Congress  of  Prot.  Epis.  Church, 

Philadelphia,    Pa 20 

'^    Essay,  February  28,  1878.     "The  Teaching  of  Religion."    Divin- 
ity School  of  Yale  University,  New  Haven,  Conn 34 

Essay,  March,   1879.      "The  Pulpit  and  Popular  Skepticism." 

Princeton  Eeview 61 

Address,  November  18,  1880.  At  Two  Hundred  and  Fiftieth  Com- 
memoration of  the  Foundation  of  the  First  Church  in  Bos- 
ton, Mass 82 

Address,  May  22,   1881.     At  Thirtieth  Anniversary   of  Young 

Men's  Christian  Association,  Boston,  Mass 87 

Address,    October   27,    1881.     "Liturgical    Growth."     Seventh 

Congress  of  Prot.  Epis.  Church,  Pi-ovidence,  E.  1 96 

/      Essay,  October  7,  1884.     "Authority  and  Conscience."     Ninth 

Congress  of  Prot.  Epis.  Church,  Detroit,  Mich 105 

Essay,  1885.  "A  Century  of  Church  Growth  in  Boston."  Memo- 
rial History  of  Boston,  Mass 119 

Address,  October  14,  1885.  At  the  Commemoration  of  the 
Seventy-fifth  Anniversary  of  American  Board  of  Commis- 
sioners for  Foreign  Missions,  Boston,  Mass 145 

V    Essay,  April  5,  1886.     "  The  New  Theism."     Clericus  Club,  Bos- 
ton, Mass 150 


VI  CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Address,  December  15,  1886.     At  Two  Hundredth  Commemora- 

tiou  of  Foundation  of  King's  Chapel,  Boston,  Mass 162 

Address,  January  21,  1889.     At   Thirty-eighth   Anniversary  of 

Young  Men's  Christian  Association,  Boston,  Mass 170 

Address,  January  16,  1890.     At  the  Installation  of  Eev.  Lyman 

Abbott,  D.D.,  over  Plymouth  Church,  Brooklyn,  N.  Y 178 

Essay,  June  2,  1890.     "Orthodoxy."     Clerieus  Club,  Cambridge, 

Mass 183 

Address,    November   13,    1890.       "The   Conditions   of   Church 

Growth  in  Missionary  Lands."     Church  Congress  of  Prot. 

Epis.  Church,  Philadelphia,  Pa 198 

Essay,  1892.     "  The  Teachableness  of  Religion."     The  Twenty 

Club,  Boston,  Mass 204 

Essay.     "  The  Healthy  Conditions  of  a  Change  of  Faith  " 218 


ON   LITERARY   AND   SOCIAL  TOPICS. 

Essay,  1859.     "Poetry."     Howard  School,  Alexandria,  Va 234 

Essay,  August  31,  1869.     "The  Purposes  of  Scholarship."     Phi 

Beta  Kappa  Society,  Brown  University,  Providence,  R.  I. .   247 

Essay,   June  27,    1871.     "Graduation."     The  Gannett   School, 

Boston,  Mass 273 

Address,  May  30,  1873.     At  the  Dedication  of  Memorial  Hall, 

Andover,  Mass 283 

Essay,  December  27,  1874.  "Milton  as  an  Educator."  Massa- 
chusetts Teachers'  Association 300 

Essay,  July  7,  1875.     "Courage."     At  Twenty-first  Anniversary 

of  Massachiisetts  State  Normal  School,  Salem,  Mass 319 

Address,  February  22,  1881.     At  the  Dedication  of  Public  Latin 

and  English  High  School-house,  Boston,  Mass 336 

Essay,  October,  1881.     "Dean  Stanley."     Atlantic  Monthly ... .   341 

Address,  May  30,  1882.  At  the  Laying  of  Corner-stone  of  the 
Wells  Memorial  Working-men's  Club  and  Institute,  Boston, 
Mass 367 

Address,  November  13,  1883.     "  Martin  Luther. "     At  Celebra- 


CONTENTS.  VU 

PAGE 

tion  by  the  Evangelical  Alliance  of  the  United  States  of  the 
Foui"  Hundredth  Anniversary  of  his  Birth,  New  York,  N.Y.  375 

Address,  April  23,  1885.  At  Celebration  of  Two  Hundred  and 
Fiftieth  Anniversary  of  Foundation  of  Public  Latin  School, 
Boston,  Mass 393 

Essay,  March  4,  1886.  "  Biogi-aphy."  Phillips  Academy,  Ex- 
eter, N.  H 427 

Address,  July  21,  1886.     "Literature  and  Life."     Chautauqua 

Assembly,  Framingham,  Mass 454 

Essay,  October,  1886.     "  Henry  Hobson  Richardson."  Harvard 

Montldy 482 

Address,  October  1,  1890.    At  the  Dedication  of  the  People's 

Institute,  Eoxbury,  Mass 490 

Address,  January  30,  1892.  At  a  Meeting  in  Behalf  of  the  Chil- 
dren's Aid  Society,  Philadelphia,  Pa 497 

Address,  December  21, 1892.  At  Celebration  by  the  New  Eng- 
land Society  of  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.,  of  the  Two  Hundred  and 
Seventy-second  Anniversary  of  the  Landing  of  the  Pilgrims, 
Brooklyn,  N.  Y 509 

Essay.     "  The  Public-school  System." 519 


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in  2009  with  funding  from 

Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


http://www.archive.org/details/essaysaddressesrOObroo 


ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

RELIGIOUS. 


THE  CENTRALIZING   POWER   OF   THE   GOSPEL. 

(Episcopal  Theological  Seminary,  Alexandi'ia,  Va.,  1858.) 

How  wlien  we  once  get  witliin  the  sphere  of  a  great 
truth  we  find  all  mental  life  seeking  its  center  in  it — 
thought  and  fancy,  energy  and  faith,  hope,  fear,  and  specu- 
lation, all  hurrying  to  the  forum  where  their  business  is 
to  be  done  and  their  fate  decided.  It  is  just  as  when  we 
come  near  a  great  city  we  see  life  becoming  more  and 
more  centralized  every  mile ;  the  scattered  interests  and 
pleasures  and  pursuits  of  \dUage  life  begin  to  look  city- 
ward ;  the  great  roads  begin  to  run  in  long  straight  lines 
on  to  the  distant  center ;  the  little  lanes  creep  on  between 
their  hedges  striving  the  same  way ;  houses  begin  to  take 
the  city  look ;  men  are  working  for  city  needs  with  an 
eye  to  the  demands  of  city  taste  or  necessity,  and  each 
new-comer  falls  into  the  great  stream  and  is  carried  on 
to  the  market-place  with  the  rest. 

And  in  spiritual  no  less  than  in  mental  hfe  there  lives 
the  same  deep  power.  Truth  centralizes  not  Thought 
only,  but  Affection  and  WiU.  The  soul  that  lived  for  a 
thousand  ends  sees  God's  light  for  a  moment,  and  begins 
to  live  for  one ;  the  dissipated  moral  nature  grows  to  a 
system  round  its  central  sun ;  the  aimless  study  of  earth's 
schools  is  sanctified  thenceforth,  for  it  is  a  culture  of  a 

1 


2  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

soul  for  heaven,  and  Imman  energy  feels  the  strong  finger 
of  God's  truth  upon  it,  and  stands  up  in  the  new  dignity 
of  holy  zeal. 

Thus  every  truth  that  pretends  to  man's  adherence  cen- 
trahzes  man's  nature,  and  claims  it  all,  and  gives  it  all 
work  to  do  ;  and  thus  Christianity,  if  it  claim  to  be  a  com- 
plete and  not  a  partial  system,  for  the  redemption  of  our 
life  must  come  with  its  central  truth,  broad  enough  and 
true  enough  to  embrace  and  save  it  all.  That  truth  it 
brings,  and  so  its  fii-st  assumption  and  its  highest  glory 
is — Man's  only  help ;  the  concentration  of  the  moral  life 
in  Christ ;  the  Intellect  coming  up  to  say,  "  Lord,  teach 
me  ;  "  the  Heart  bringing  its  tribute  of  loyalty  and  love  ; 
the  Will  with  bowed  head  echoing  the  first  Christian  ques- 
tion, "  Wliat  wilt  thou  have  me  do  ? " ;  Sorrow  seeking  for 
comfort,  Faith  for  a  resting-place,  Hope  for  an  assurance 
in  the  Immanuel,  the  visible  Deity  who  came  to  save  our 
race. 

The  Intellect  coming  up  to  say,  "Lord,  teach  me." 
There  iz  no  truth  from  which  even  man's  theoretical  ad- 
herence hangs  aloof  as  it  does  from  this  of  the  necessary 
submission  of  the  whole  intellectual  manhood  to  the  obedi- 
ence of  Christ.  God's  plan  has  aU  the  wonderf  id  simphc- 
ity  that  makes  His  natural  world  so  grand.  In  the  center 
of  our  life  stands  the  grand  Christ-truth  He  has  set  up, 
the  single  fountain  out  of  which  all  sin  and  all  unclean- 
ness  are  to  drink  for  healing.  Every  step  that  is  not 
toward  the  fountain  is  toward  the  desert.  Our  work  here, 
as  everywhere,  is  with  the  tendencies  of  things.  Let  us 
understand  this  matter.  God  has  ordained  this  world  and 
another,  and  this  world  is  a  striving  after  that.  Only  one 
door  stands  open  to  connect  the  two :  "  I  am  the  Way, 
the  Truth,  the  Life."  Now  if  God  seriously  meant  that 
man  might  reach  that  Way  and  Truth,  He  gave  him  no 
faculty  that  might-  not  struggle  for  it.     There  is  no  sine- 


THE   CENTRALIZING  POWER    OF  THE   GOSPEL.         6 

cure  in  the  soul's  economy.  Every  power  has  its  work  to 
do,  every  capacity  its  gift  to  fill  it,  every  motive  its  wheels 
to  tm-n  or  shaft  to  drive  in  achieving  finally  the  soul's 
great  work;  and  so  the  fullest  manhood  of  man's  best 
development  is  sanctified  by  God's  purpose  of  man's  sal- 
vation. But  when  one  coward  faculty  breaks  off  from  the 
hard  struggle,  ignores  the  Christhood  that  says,  ''  By  Me 
if  any  man  enter  in  he  shall  be  saved,"  begins  to  play  with 
a  theory  instead  of  living  by  a  truth,  forthwith  the  "  sim- 
plicity that  is  in  Christ "  is  marred  and  mangled  by  the 
multiphcity  that  is  in  man.  God's  ban  lies  upon  no  fair 
exei-cise  of  the  faculties  of  labor  if  they  be  but  exercised 
as  He  directs.  His  whole  omnipotence  is  pledged  to  make 
every  Christian  effort  of  those  faculties  effectual  and 
strong.  All  heaven  is  working  for  us  if  we  will,  as  the 
httle  child  digs  his  well  in  the  sea-shore  sand  and  then 
the  great  ocean  comes  up  and  fills  it  for  him.  And  here 
lies  all  solved  before  us  the  problem  of  Profane  and  Sacred 
Study.  Looking  to  this  divine  simplicity  of  the  scheme 
of  life,  to  Christ  that  saves,  to  God  that  blesses,  no  study 
is  profane.  Looking  away  from  that  central  truth  of 
Christ,  there  is  no  profaner  work  than  Bible  study.  So 
long  as  the  intellect  owns  allegiance,  so  long  its  work  is 
full  of  piety  and  purpose,  its  Avhole  development  is  a  train- 
ing of  the  soul  that  is  an  heir  of  glory,  against  its  corona- 
tion-day. Books  become  sacraments,  schools  are  temples, 
and  the  mental  life  grows  holy  because  its  triumphs  are 
sacrifices  to  the  everlasting  truth  of  Christ.  If  this  be 
so,  then  how  it  brands  the  atheism  that  would  substitute 
the  frivolity  of  culture  or  the  pedantry  of  ethics  for  this 
divinity  of  truth,  that  would  go  back  from  a  Gospel  to  a 
Law,  from  a  Law  to  an  Instinct,  from  an  Instinct  to  a 
Dream,  disowning  its  bii-thright  claim  to  the  higher  Chris- 
tian portion. 

And  with  the  Intellect  the  Will  and  Heart  must  come. 


4  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDEESSES. 

See  how  the  new  faith  is  tlie  resurrection  of  the  life,  how 
the  new  purpose  that  concentrates  ever}'  power  in  the 
work  of  Christ  binds  the  whole  human  natm-e  closer  to 
the  Truth,  and  closer  to  its  race.  It  binds  it  closer  to  the 
Truth.  Theories  and  schemes  and  ceremonies  grow  tame 
and  dead  to  the  man  who  has  looked  the  gospel  in  the 
face.  Wliat !  with  this  new  gravitation  that  I  feel  draw- 
ing me  and  drawing  all  creation  to  the  center  of  oui*  hfe, 
shall  I  turn  away  to  the  little  forces  that  would  drag  me 
off  to  little  aims  ?  Shall  I  trifle  with  this  new  power  of 
believing  ?  For  all  moral  carelessness  lessens  our  capacity 
of  faith — makes  us  not  only  less  belie\ang  but  less  able 
to  believe,  destroys  as  far  as  it  can  oiu*  power  to  rest  on 
testimony  for  truth.  It  is  not  only  that  some  drops  are 
spilled,  but  the  cup  itself  is  broken  into  uselessness.  And 
most  of  all,  we  are  conscious  that  it  is  growing  harder 
and  harder  every  day  for  us  to  believe;  the  conviction 
that-  once  brought  faith  inevitably  does  not  bring  it  now, 
and  the  faith  when  it  comes  does  not  bless  us  as  it  once 
did  with  trust  and  peace.  This  is  what  the  soul  that  has 
once  felt  the  simplicity  of  Christ  dreads  most  of  aU,  for  it 
breaks  that  simplicity  into  the  old  fragmentary  life  again. 
"  Give  me  a  hope  that  points  where  my  life's  hope  is  point- 
ing, a  light  to  shine  upon  the  road  that  leads  me  Christ- 
ward.  Let  me  ignore  the  system  and  the  Church,  the 
teacher  and  the  book,  that  will  not  give  me  these."  Tliis 
is  the  soul's  new  cry.  This  must  be  the  world's  cry  if  it 
ever  sees  salvation.  Our  hope  is  in  this  Christian  radi- 
calism which  through  the  myriad  shows  and  seml^lances 
of  human  life  goes  down  directly  to  the  heart  of  things 
and  seizes  Faith  and  grapples  Hope  and  clings  to  Charity, 
and  says,  "  Lo,  out  of  these  shall  grow  a  Christian  Church 
for  all  the  world,  and  out  of  these  a  Christian  experience 
for  me."  Is  there  not  something  solemnly  heroic  in  this 
one  central  purpose  standing  thus  cahnly  in  the  midst 


TEE   CENTRALIZING   POWER    OF  THE   GOSPEL.         o 

of  the  feverish  anarchy  of  the  Avorkl's  million  hopes  and 
schemes  ?  So  men  were  bartering  and  selling  and  eating 
and  drinking,  and  the  noonda}^  hubbub  was  loud  and  wild 
in  Jerusalem  of  old,  while  the  great  agony  of  Calvar}-  was 
working  out  the  world's  redemption. 

This  new  Christian  simplicity  is  not  perfect  till  it  recog- 
nizes the  world's  hope  in  its  own.  Then  there  comes  the 
true  "  liberality  "  of  oui*  religion.  The  man  begins  to  iden- 
tify himself  with  the  race,  and  wins  a  share  in  its  collec- 
tive faith  and  power.  He  multiplies  his  life  eight  hundred 
millionfold.  The  world  was  made,  and  sun  and  stars  or- 
dained, and  salvation  sent  to  earth  alike  for  humanity 
and  him.  The  history  of  the  race  becomes  his  experience, 
the  happiness  of  the  race  his  glory,  the  progress  of  the 
race  his  hope.  He  begins  to  say,  ^^We  shall  do  this  and 
thus,  win  new  secrets  from  nature  and  new  truth  from 
God,"  for  this  man  goes  hand  in  hand  with  humanit}^ 
down  the  highways  of  its  life,  till  they  stand  together  be- 
fore the  throne  of  God  in  heaven.  He  says  of  Christ's 
truths :  "  I  believe  in  these  things  because  I  know  that 
they  have  helped  my  race.  I  look  to  them  as  I  look  to 
the  sun  with  a  faith  that  all  these  centuries  of  sunlight 
f()rl)id  me  to  disown.  I  hear  them  from  the  Bible  claim- 
ing my  allegiance,  as  from  all  nature  I  hear  God's  truth 
demanding  that  I  should  give  reason  room  to  grow  to 
faith  and  love." 

We  talk  much  of  a  conservative  Church  and  a  progress- 
ive Chm-ch,  of  a  true  and  a  false  philosophy  of  moral, 
social,  and  ecclesiastical  life.  Let  us  be  sm-e  no  Church 
is  soundly  conservati\'e  or  positively  and  steadily  advanc- 
ing, that  no  philosophy  is  Mise  and  no  Christianity  Chris- 
tian where  the  great  Centralizing  Power,  the  gra\dtation 
that  liinds  every  particle  of  Church,  and  Life  to  Christ  the 
Center,  is  robbed  of  its  supremacy.  We  have  tried  to  see 
how  history,  how  morals,  how  the  miracles  of  intellect, 


C  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDRESSES. 

how  the  sweetest  hopes  of  social  culture  and  the  gi*andest 
prospects  of  the  world's  great  progress  find  their  center 
in  the  manifested  life  of  God  as  seen  in  Christ.  Cut  aloof 
from  that,  they  are  beautiful,  but  their  beauty  is  frag- 
mentary and  untrue.  Linked  by  the  Law  of  God  to  that, 
the  Central  Fact  about  which  God  has  systematized  His 
nioral  world,  they  find  their  place  and  own  their  mission 
in  working  out  obediently  to  it  the  ultimate  perfection  of 
the  world,  of  the  Church,  and  of  the  single  soul. 


HERESY. 

(Clerieus  Club,  Boston,  Mass.,  October,  1873.) 

It  is  hardly  to  be  supposed  that  wlien  oui*  people  Sun- 
day after  Sunday  pray  to  the  good  Lord  to  deliver  them 
from  all  false  doctrine,  heresy,  and  schism,  they  have  a 
very  clear  idea  of  what  the  sin  exactly  is  which  the  second 
term  in  their  prayer  denotes.  It  is  one  of  the  terms  which 
people  are  very  apt  to  think  they  understand  until  they 
undertake  its  explanation ;  then  they  find  that  their  idea 
of  it  is  very  vague.  The  term  itself  has  a  certain  obsolete- 
ness of  sound,  a  certain  flavor  of  that  old-time  quaintness, 
which  many  good  souls  hke  in  their  religion.  It  inspires 
a  gentle  horror  that  is  not  unpleasant,  and  indeed  seems 
to  be  a  favorite  sin  for  some  men's  minds  to  dwell  upon, 
perhaps  because  its  very  vagueness  saves  them  from  the 
possibility,  and  so  from  the  necessity,  of  bringing  it  very 
closely  home  either  to  their  own  or  to  their  brethren's 
consciences  and  destinies. 

And  yet  with  all  this  it  is  clear  enough  that  there  is 
something  called  heresy,  which  in  all  times  has  been 
dreaded  and  rebuked,  and  often  violently  punished.  Scrip- 
ture begins  the  strain  of  objurgation,  and  it  is  heard  still 
in  the  literature  of  to-day.  Surely  it  will  be  well  if  we 
can  study  the  meaning  of  the  disgraceful  term,  the  nature 
of  the  disgraceful  sin  ;  and  lest  any  one  should  think  that 
we  treat  as  vague  and  difficult  that  which  is  recognized 
to  be  perfectly  simple  and  clear,  let  us  justify  our  essay 
with  this,  as  a  sort  of  motto,  out  of  St.  Augustine :  ''Not 


0  ESSATS  AND  ADDEElSSES. 

every  error/'  he  says,  "is  heresy,  though  every  heresy 
which  is  blameworthy  caimot  be  heresy  without  some 
error.  What,  therefore,  makes  one  a  heretic  I  tliink  it  is 
perhaps  impossible,  certainly  very  difficult,  to  comprehend 
in  a  regular  definition." 

That  certainly  opens  a  promising  field  for  study  and 
discussion.  It  is  one  of  those  subjects  which  must  be 
studied  in  connection  with  the  Vfords  with  which  they 
have  always  been  identified.  The  word  "  heresy,"  then, 
as  ever^^body  knows,  primarily  means  "  choice."  It  is  a 
subjective  thing,  an  action  of  the  will.  Here  at  the  very 
beginning  its  moral  character  is  stamj^ed  upon  it.  Per- 
haps it  is  not  too  soon  to  say  that  to  trace  that  moral 
character  always  clinging  to  it  obstinately,  haunting  it, 
and  forever  reappearing  when  it  seems  to  have  been  lost, 
always  determining  its  treatment  and  its  limitations,  will 
be  the  substance  of  tliis  essay. 

Beginning,  then,  with  this  moral  meaning,  the  word 
attains  a  secondary  sense.  It  passes  next  to  be  applied  to 
that  which  is  the  common  choice  of  any  group  of  thinkers 
who  choose  a  certain  thing.  Here  it  becomes  objective. 
It  comes  to  mean  a  school  of  thought.  As  such  at  first  it 
has  no  tone  either  of  praise  or  blame.  It  is  a  vox  media. 
This  is  its  classic  use.  "We  hear  of  the  Stoic  heresy  and 
the  Peripatetic  heresy.  In  the  same  indifferent  way  it  is 
used  four  times  in  the  New  Testament :  "  The  heresy  of 
the  Pharisees,"  "  the  heresy  of  the  Sadducees,"  "  the  heresy 
of  the  Nazarenes,"  "  the  most  straitest  heresy  of  our  relig- 
ion." In  all  these  passages  there  is  no  blame  nor  praise, 
only  description.  But  any  one  can  see  how,  just  as  soon 
as  the  thought  of  a  clear  and  absolute  authority  in  matters 
of  faith,  was  introduced,  the  whole  act  of  choice,  or  the 
selection  of  what  the  chooser  pleased,  instead  of  what  the 
authority  commanded,  became  a  sin ;  and  so  we  come  to 
four  other  passages  in  the  New  Testament,  in  which  her- 


HERESY.  9 

esy  is  distinctly  spoken  of  with  strong  denunciation,  and 
from  wliicli  the  whole  subsequent  treatment  of  it  has 
derived  its  tone.  These  passages  need  only  be  indicated. 
"  After  the  way  which  they  call  heresy/'  says  Paul,  "  so 
worship  I  the  God  of  my  fathers."  To  the  Corinthians  he 
says  :  "  For  there  must  be  heresies  among  you,  that  they 
which  are  approved  may  be  made  manifest."  And  again 
to  the  Galatians,  "  The  works  of  the  flesh  are  manifest, 
which  are  these,"  and  then,  classed  with  adultery,  idol- 
atry, witchcraft,  and  drunkenness,  comes  "heresies,"  "of 
the  which,"  he  says,  "  I  tell  you  .  .  .  that  they  which  do 
such  things  shall  not  inherit  the  kingdom  of  God."  The 
fourth  passage  is  from  St.  Peter,  who  says :  "  There  shall 
be  false  teachers  among  you,  who  privily  shall  bring  in 
damnable  heresies,  even,  denying  the  Lord  that  bought 
them,  and  bring  upon  themselves  swift  destruction."  To 
these  must  be  added  one  other  passage,  where  the  word 
used  is  not  "heresy"  but  "heretic,"  but  it  bears  directly 
on  our  study.  St.  Paul  writes  to  Titus  :  "  A  man  that  is 
a  heretic,  after  the  first  and  second  admonition,  reject; 
knowing  that  he  that  is  such  is  subverted,  and  sinneth, 
being  condemned  of  himself." 

These  are  the  j^assages  in  which  the  Apostles  speak  by 
name  of  heresy.  There  is  no  time  for  any  labored  com- 
mentary on  them.  We  can  only  state  what  seems  to  be 
the  clear  characteristics  of  the  sin  as  it  is  here  described. 
These  characteristics  are  two.  First,  heresy  is  a  term 
which  has  reference  to  ideas,  and  so  is  distinguished  at 
once  from  schism,  which  relates  to  worship  and  discipline. 
This  is  clear  in  all  the  passages  except  the  fii-st  and  sec- 
ond, in  which,  indeed,  heresy  seems  to  be  almost  identical 
Avith  schism.  The  second  conclusion  from  these  passages 
is  this,  that  heresy  involves  personal  and  wilful  obstinacy. 
It  is  impossible  to  read  them  through  and  not  see  the  dis- 
tinctness with  which  the  heretic  is  blamed,  not  because 


10  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDBESSES. 

he  holds  this  or  that  opinion,  bnt  because  he  is  conceived 
to  hold  it  wilfully,  in  deliberate  and  impious  rejection  of 
its  opposite,  which  he  knows  is  the  Word  of  God.  His 
heresy  is  a  "  work  of  the  flesh."  He  is  said  to  be  con- 
demned of  himself.  His  sin  stands  side  by  side  with  the 
cruel  and  filthy  actions  that  come  from  cruel  and  lustful 
hearts. 

Nothing  can  be  further  from  the  intellectual  concep- 
tion of  heresy  which  has  prevailed  and  still  prevails  in 
the  Christian  Church,  than  this  presentation  of  it  as 
moral  wickedness  which  stands  out  in  the  New  Testa- 
ment. '-Look  through  the  Epistles,"  says  Dr.  Arnold, 
"  and  you  will  find  nothing  there  condemned  as  heresy 
but  wliat  was  mere  wickedness ;"  and  again  he  says :  "  I 
think  that  you  will  find  that  all  the  false  doctrines  spoken 
of  by  the  Apostles  are  doctrines  of  sheer  wickedness,  that 
their  counterpart  in  modern  times  is  to  be  found  in  the 
Anabaptists  of  Miinster,  or  the  Fifth-Monarchy  men,  or 
in  mere  secular  High-Churchmen,  or  hjq^ocritical  E^^an- 
gelicals ;  in  those  who  make  Christianity  minister  to  lust 
or  to  covetousness  or  ambition,  not  in  those  who  interpret 
Scriptm'e  to  the  best  of  their  conscience  and  ability,  be 
their  interpretation  ever  so  erroneous." 

As  we  leave  the  region  of  Scripture  and  come  to  the 
Fathers  of  the  Church,  it  is  evident  enough  that  therfe  is 
a  growing  tendency  to  measure  heresy  by  its  divergence 
as  opinion  from  certain  standards  of  Church  doctrine,  and 
not  as  will  from  a  certain  uprightness  and  puritj'  of 
heart ;  to  really  lose  its  character  as  sin  and  define  it  as 
error,  however  the  treatment  that  belongs  to  sin  alone 
still  continues  to  be  lavished  on  it.  If  the  two  could 
have  been  reasonably  held  to  be  identical,  all  would  have 
been  well.  If  there  had  been  a  clear  settled  line  of  Chris- 
tian truth,  so  manifest  that  no  one  could  miss  it  except  by 
obstinacy,  so  universal  that  all  should  know  at  once  what 


REBESY.  11 

was  meant  when  men  spoke  of  the  Christian  faith ;  in  one 
word,  if  the  Quod  semper,  quod  unique,  quod  ah  omnibus, 
had  been  a  fact  of  history  instead  of  a  dream  of  later 
theorizers,  it  would  not  have  been  difficult  to  vmderstand 
heresy.  The  intellectual  divergence  could  not  then  have 
come  without  the  moral  wilfulness ;  but  as  it  is,  they  are 
continually  coming  separately,  and  bewildering  the  Fathers 
terribly.  Heresy,  with  the  New  Testament  denunciations 
of  it  in  their  ears,  is  always  a  moral  term,  and  yet  they 
are  always  trying  to  justify  the  attril^ution  of  it  and  of 
its  penalties  in  circumstances  where  personal  guilt  is 
wholly  out  of  the  question.  This  perplexity  haunts  the 
writings  of  the  Fathers. 

Tertullian,  with  his  own  hot,  turbid  logic,  claims  that 
"heretics  cannot  be  Christians,  because  what  they  choose 
themselves  they  certainly  do  not  take  from  Christ."  After 
which  statement  one  can  understand  how  he  held  a  good 
many  other  of  his  notions  about  the  Holy  Spirit  and  its 
action  on  the  mind  of  man. 

Origen  makes  the  fact  of  heresy  depend  on  the  size  of 
the  error  that  is  held,  which  is  certainly  as  arbitrary  and 
hoj)eless  a  discrimination  as  any  perplexed  mind  ever  fled 
to  for  refuge. 

Jerome  seems  to  recognize  more  distinctly  the  moral 
nature  of  heresy,  though  his  language  is  not  wholly  clear, 
but  at  least  he  does  not  make  it  merely  a  departure  from 
the  Church.  "Whoever  understands  Scripture  other- 
wise," he  says,  "than  the  sense  of  the  Holy  Spirit  de- 
mands, by  which  it  was  written,  though  he  has  not  left 
the  Church,  yet  can  he  be  called  a  heretic,  and  is  of  the 
works  of  the  flesh,  choosing  the  things  Avhich  are  worse," 
which  sounds  like  Jerome. 

But  the  most  interesting  and  thoughtful  treatment  of 
heresy  among  the  Fathers,  the  most  constant  recognition 
of  its  essential  morality,  is  found,  as  might  have  been 


12  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

expected,  in  the  writing's  of  Augustine.  These  are  his 
words:  ''He  is  an  heretic,  in  my  opinion,  who  for  the 
sake  of  glory  or  power,  or  other  secular  advantages, 
either  invents  or  embraces  and  follows  new  opinions. 
But  he  who  believes  men  of  this  kind  is  a  man  deluded 
by  a  certain  imagination  of  truth  and  piety."  And  again : 
"As  to  those  who  defend  a  false  and  wicked  opinion  with- 
out any  self-will,  especially  if  they  have  not  invented  it 
by  an  audacious  presumption,  but  received  it  from  their 
parents,  who  have  been  seduced  and  fallen  into  error, 
and  if  they  seek  the  truth  with  care,  and  are  ready  to  cor- 
rect themselves  when  they  have  found  it,  they  cannot  be 
ranked  among  heretics."  I  think  this  is  an  account  of 
heresy  at  which  many  a  modern  dogmatist  would  hesi- 
tate. Certainly  it  keeps  the  great  moral  element  plain 
and  strong.  Not  that  Augustine  is  always  so  clear.  He 
says  again:  "Suppose  that  a  man  holds  the  opinion  of 
Photin  about  Jesus  Christ,  believing  it  to  be  the  Catholic 
faith,  I  do  not  call  him  a  heretic  yet,  unless,  after  he  is 
better  instructed,  he  prefer  to  resist  the  Cathohc  faith 
than  to  renounce  the  opinions  he  has  advanced."  Here 
the  formal  is  seen  pressing  upon  the  moral  conception  of 
heresy,  but  even  now  he  is  far  from  the  sublime  rejection 
of  the  morality  altogether,  which  good  Bishop  Fulgentius 
reaches  when  he  triumphantly  puts  himself  on  record 
thus :  "  Good  works,  martyrdom  even,  serve  nothing  for 
the  salvation  of  him  who  is  not  in  the  unity  of  the  Church, 
so  long  as  the  malice  of  schism  and  heresy  persevere  in 
him." 

On  the  whole,  then,  we  have  the  Fathers,  while  they 
depart  from  the  simple  moral  conception  of  heresy  which 
Paul  and  Peter  held,  while  some  of  them  lost  its  moral 
character  entirely,  yet  for  the  most  part  clinging  to  it 
strongly,  and  trying  to  make  it  l^lend  with  the  formal  and 
dogmatic  notions  of  heresy  which  were  growing  apace. 


HEEESY.  13 

As  Romaiiism  becomes  rampant,  the  definitions  of  her- 
esy become  more  and  more  unmoral.  There  is  neither 
need  nor  time  to  multiply  quotations,  but  let  us  come 
down  a  long  way,  and  take  one  Romish  writer,  who  gives 
a  good  round  hearty  desciiptiou  of  heresy  Vv^hich  is  refresh- 
ing. Here  we  have  the  full-blown  ecclesiastical  theory  of 
heresy,  which  is,  after  all,  what  a  good  many  j)eople,  An- 
glicans and  others,  are  still  dreaming  about  to-day.  The 
Abbe  Bergier  writes  in  his  theological  dictionary  as  fol- 
lows :  "  Heresy  is  a  voluntary  and  obstinate  error,  con- 
trary to  some  dogma  of  the  faith."  So  far  it  sounds 
moral.  But  he  goes  on  :  ''  How  can  we  know  whether  the 
error  is  voluntary  or  involuntary,  criminal  or  innocent, 
the  result  of  vicious  passions  or  defective  light  ? "  His 
answer  is  in  the  true  strain  of  Catholic  reasoning.  "First, 
as  the  Christian  doctrine  is  revealed  by  God,"  he  says,  ''•  it 
is  a  crime  to  wish  to  know  it  of  ourselves,  and  not  by  the 
instrumentality  of  those  whom  God  has  set  to  teach  it. 
Second,  since  God  has  established  the  Church  or  the  bod}^ 
of  pastors  to  teach  the  faithful,  when  the  Church  has 
spoken  it  is  on  our  part  an  obstinate  pride  to  resist  theii' 
decision  and  prefer  our  light  to  tlieirs.  Third,  the  j^assion 
which  has  led  the  leaders  of  sects  and  their  partisans 
has  been  shown  by  the  means  which  they  have  employed 
to  establish  their  opinions."  How  familiar  it  all  sounds  ! 
Then  he  goes  on  again:  "A  man  may  deceive  himself  in 
good  faith  at  first ;  but  as  soon  as  he  resists  the  Church, 
tries  to  make  proselytes,  forms  a  party,  intrigues,  makes 
a  noise,  he  no  longer  acts  from  good  faith,  but  from  pride 
and  ambition."  This  is  the  full-blown  ecclesiastical  no- 
tion of  heresy.  It  was  what,  though  in  expressions  that 
keep  the  air  of  morality  among  them  still,  the  Council  of 
Trent  put  into  its  catechism  in  these  words :  '^  A  person  is 
not  to  be  called  a  heretic  so  soon  as  he  errs  in  matters  of 
faith :  then  only  is  he  to  be  so  called  when  in  defiance  of 


14  JESS  ATS  AXn  J  DDF  ESSES. 

the  authority  of  the  Church  he  maintains  impious  opinions 
with  unyiekling  pertinacity." 

The  Reformation  was  the  setting  free  of  morahty  and 
moral  distinctions  by  the  breaking  up  of  arbitrary  eccle- 
siastical definitions.  And  so  it  is  not  strange  that  heresy 
began  to  resume  in  Protestantism  the  moral  coloring 
which  it  had  almost  lost.  There  appeared  indeed  a  ten- 
dency to  substitute  dogmatic  for  ecclesiastical  lines,  and 
the  writ  de  kaerefico  comburendo  was  in  force  in  England 
till  the  time  of  Charles  II.  Two  Anabaptists  suffered 
under  Elizabeth,  and  two  Ariaus  under  James  I.,  for  her- 
es_v.  And  yet  one  would  hke  to  quote  some  of  the  clear- 
est and  truest  and  most  rational  accounts  of  heresy  that 
ever  have  been  written,  from  some  of  the  English  Puri- 
tans, notably  one  by  Robinson,  the  Pilgrim  Father,  a 
good,  great  man. 

These,  however,  we  must  leave.  We  want  to  come  to 
a  series  of  utterances  upon  the  subject  of  oiTr  essay,  made 
by  the  liberal  divines  of  the  Chui'ch  of  England  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  which  certainly  come  nearer  in  their 
statement  of  the  moral  character  of  heresy  to  the  standard 
of  the  New  Testament  than  anything  else  we  know  in 
Christian  writers.  If  anything  comes  nearer  we  should 
rejoice  to  see  it.  Standing,  as  these  men  did,  between  the 
stiff  ecclesiasticism  and  the  extravagant  Puritanism  of 
their  day,  there  came  to  them  a  very  clear  understanding 
of  the  relations  which  religious  truth  holds  to  the  indi- 
vidual conscience  and  intellect.  One  thing  was  to  them 
very  evident :  that  words  of  personal  blame,  such  as  the 
New  Testament  lavishes  upon  heresy,  could  belong  only 
to  personal  guilt,  and  the  personal  guilt  could  attach  only 
to  the  action  of  the  personal  will.  It  is  strange  that  so 
plain  a  truth  should  ever  have  been  forgotten.  It  was 
good  that  it  should  be  asserted  once  again. 

When  John  Hales  is  asked   ''whether  the   Christian 


HERESY.  15 

Church  may  err  in  fundamentals,"  he  begins  his  answer 
by  saying  "that  every  Christian  may  err  that  will,"  other- 
wise there  could  be  no  heresy,  "  heresy  being  nothing  else 
but  wilful  error."  Chillingworth  is  veiy  unmistakable  in 
his  assertion  that  there  is  no  heresy  unless  the  truth  be 
clearly  made  kiiown  to  the  heretic,  and  be  by  him  delib- 
erately rejected.  "Heresy  we  consider  an  obstinate  de- 
fense of  an  error  against  any  necessary  article  of  the 
Christian  faith."  Stillingfleet  holds  "verv'  strongly  the 
opinion  that  mere  diversity  of  opinion  is  no  ground  of 
heresy  laying  men  open  to  the  censure  of  the  Church." 
"It  is  only  the  endeavor,  by  difference  of  opinion,  to 
alienate  men's  spirit  from  one  another,  and  thereby  to 
break  the  society  into  fractions  and  divisions,  which 
makes  men  lial^le  to  restraint  and  punishment."  In  all 
these  passages,  and  many  others  like  them,  there  is  the 
strong  assertion,  the  intense  belief  in  personal  responsi- 
bility and  personal  rights.  The  men  are  churchmen,  with 
churchmen's  calm  and  measm-ed  ways  of  expression,  but 
they  are  all  verging  toward,  and  almost  merging  into, 
that  profound  and  lofty  belief  in  the  personality  of  relig- 
ion, with  all  its  associated  rights  and  duties,  which  the 
Puritan  John  Milton  was  at  the  same  time  uttering  in  his 
splendid  pi'ose.  He  has  brought  the  moral  character  of 
heresy  to  its  completest  statement.  "  Truih  is  compared 
in  Scripture,"  he  says,  "  to  a  streaming  fountain ;  if  her 
waters  flow  not  in  a  perpetual  progression,  they  sink  into 
a  muddy  pool  of  conformity  and  tradition.  A  man  may 
be  a  heretic  in  the  truth,  and  if  he  believes  things  onl}' 
because  his  pastor  says  so,  or  the  assembly  so  determines, 
without  knowing  other  reason,  though  his  belief  be  true, 
yet  the  very  truth  he  holds  becomes  his  heresy." 

But  much  the  most  philosophical  treatment  of  heresy 
in  this  century  is  found  in  the  best  works  of  Jeremy  Tay- 
lor.    In  the  "Liberty  of  Propliesying "  he  develops  his 


16  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

idea.  It  is  simply  that  heresy  being  the  opposite  of  faith, 
that  moral  character  which  is  fundamental  and  essential 
in  faith  must  be  fundamental  and  essential  in  heresy  as 
well.  I  venture  to  quote  rather  a  long  passage,  which 
cannot  well  be  divided.  It  will  be  no  great  hardship  to 
listen  to  Jeremy  Taylor.  "  For  heresy,"  he  says,  "  is  not 
an  error  of  the  understanding,  but  an  error  of  the  will. 
And  this  is  clearly  insinuated  in  Scripture  in  the  style 
whereof  faith  and  a  good  life  are  made  one  duty,  and  vice 
is  called  opposite  to  faith,  and  heresy  opposed  to  holiness 
and  sanctity.  .  .  .  For  as  the  nature  of  faith  is,  so  is  the 
nature  of  heresy,  contraries  having  the  same  proportion 
and  commensuration.  Now  faith,  if  it  be  taken  for  an 
act  of  the  understanding  merely,  is  so  far  from  being  that 
excellent  grace  that  justifies  us,  that  it  is  not  good  in  any 
kind  but  in  general  nature,  and  makes  the  understanding 
better  in  itself,  and  pleasing  to  God,  just  as  strength  does 
the  arm,  or  beauty  the  face,  or  health  the  body.  These 
are  natural  perfections  indeed,  and  so  knowledge  and  a 
true  belief  is  to  the  understanding.  But  this  makes  us 
not  at  all  more  acceptable  to  God,  for  then  the  unlearned 
were  certainly  in  a  damnable  condition  and  all  good  schol- 
ars should  be  saved ;  whereas  I  am  afraid  too  much  of 
the  conti-ary  is  true.  But  unless  faith  is  made  moral  by 
the  mixtures  of  choice  and  charity,  it  is  nothing  but  a 
natural  perfection,  not  a  grace  or  a  virtue ;  and  this  is 
demonstrably  proved  in  this,  that  by  the  confession  of  ail 
men,  of  all  interests  and  persuasions  in  matters  of  mere 
belief,  invincible  ignorance  is  our  excuse  if  we  be  deceived,^ 
which  could  not  be,  but  that  neither  to  believe  aright 
is  commendable,  nor  to  believe  amiss  is  reprovable ;  but 
where  both  one  and  the  other  is  voluntary,  and  chosen 
antecedently  or  consequently,  by  prime  election,  or  ex 
post  facto,  and  so  comes  to  be  considered  in  morality,  and 
is  part  of  a  good  life  or  a  bad  life  respectively.     Just  so 


HERESY.  17 

it  is  in  heresy.  If  it  be  a  design  of  ambition,  and  making 
of  a  sect,  if  it  be  for  filthy  lucre's  sake,  as  it  was  in  some 
that  were  of  the  circumcision,  if  it  be  of  pride  and  love  of 
preeminence,  as  it  was  in  Diotrephes,  or  out  of  peevish- 
ness and  indocibleness  of  disposition,  or  of  a  contentious 
spirit — that  is,  that  theu'  feet  are  not  shod  with  the  prep- 
aration of  the  gospel  of  peace — in  all  these  cases  the  error 
is  just  so  damnable  as  is  its  principle,  but  therefore  damna- 
ble not  of  itself,  but  by  reason  of  its  adherency.  And  if 
any  shall  say  any  otherwise,  it  is  to  say  that  some  men 
shall  be  damned  when  they  cannot  help  it,  perish  without 
their  own  fault,  and  be  miserable  forever,  because  of  their 
own  unhappiness  to  be  deceived  through  their  own  simplic- 
ity, and  natural  or  accidental  but  inculpable  infirmity." 

This  long  quotation  admonishes  us  that  we  must  quote 
no  more ;  nor  is  it  necessary.  We  have  seen  that  there 
have  always  been  three  ideas  concerning  what  constituted 
heresy:  (1)  the  ecclesiastical  idea,  which  measures  heresy 
by  its  departure  from  a  certain  Church  statement  of  be- 
lief ;  (2)  the  dogmatical  idea,  whicli  measures  heresy  by 
what  it  conceives  to  be  a  departure  from  the  truth  of 
Revelation ;  (3)  the  moral  idea,  which  conceives  of  heresy 
as  a  certain  personal  sin,  consisting  in  the  wilful  adherence 
to  some  view  of  truth  which  a  man  prefers,  in  rejection 
of  that  which  God  makes  known  to  him.  If  we  pursued 
our  study,  it  is  evident  enough  that  we  should  find  all 
of  these  ideas  in  books  much  later  than  Jeremy  Taylor. 
They  are  all  familiar  to  us  in  the  ordinary  talk  of  our  own 
day.  When  three  men  call  another  man  a  heretic,  one 
of  them  means  that  he  is  in  rebellion  against  the  Church, 
another  means  that  he  is  in  error,  and  the  third  means 
that  he  is  violating  his  own  conscience,  and  wilfully  shut- 
ting his  eyes  to  light. 

And  what  I  have  been  much  struck  with  is,  the  per- 
sistency with  which  the  moral  idea  has  cluug  to  heresy 


18  ESSAYS  AND   ADDIIESSES. 

in  every  age.  It  has  always  reappeared,  even  when  the 
ecclesiastical  or  dogmatical  idea  seemed  al)s()lntely  tri- 
nmphant.  The  truth  is,  that  only  by  the  moral  concep- 
tion of  heresy  can  the  heretic  be  Ijrought  within  the  range 
of  the  New  Testament,  his  heresy  comited  as  sin,  and  he 
himself  considered  lial)le  to  such  denunciations  as  Paul 
and  Peter  hea^)  upon  their  heretic.  Here,  it  seems  to  me, 
is  the  key  to  that  strange  spectacle  that  is  seen  through 
all  history — good  men  picmsly  burning  their  heretic  breth- 
ren, and  singing  psalms  as  they  put  the  fire  to  the  fagots. 
There  lias  always  been  latent,  I  believe,  in  the  honest  per- 
secutor, a  conviction  of  the  wilfulness,  the  wickedness,  the 
moral  culpability  of  the  poor  wretcih  who  suffered  for  the 
denial  of  the  virtue  of  a  wafer,  or  the  assertion  of  the 
unity  of  God.  Men  have  first  convicted  their  brethren 
of  heresy  upon  the  ecclesiastical  or  dogmatic  grounds  of 
their  own  times,  and  then  slaughtered  them  with  an  easy 
conscience  on  the  moral  grounds  of  the  New  Testament. 

And  does  not  the  assertion  of  the  moral  character  of 
heresy  meet  many  of  the  practical  difficulties  which  we 
have  felt  ourselves  when  we  have  been  forced  to  estimate 
our  fellow-men  ?  Heretic  is  a  word  of  personal  guilt.  It 
had  that  tone  when  Paul  used  it,  and  it  has  kept  it  ever 
since.  But  I  am  sure  that  we  have  all  felt,  and  perhaps 
reproached  ourselves  for  feeling,  how  impossible  it  was 
for  us  in  any  real  way  to  attach  the  notion  of  personal 
guilt  to  those  who  were  called  heretics  in  the  ordinary 
uses  of  the  word.  We  have  been  unable  to  feel  any  ve- 
hement condemnation  for  the  earnest  and  truth-seeking 
Errorist,  or  any  strong  approbation  for  the  fli^jpant  and 
partisan  Orthodox.  There  was  no  place  for  the  first  in 
the  hell,  nor  for  the  second  in  the  heaven,  which  alone 
our  consciences  tell  us  that  the  God  whom  we  worship 
could  establish.  Speaking  in  the  atmosphere  of  the  New 
Testament,  we  cannot  call  the  first  a  heretic,  nor  the 


HERESY.  19 

second  a  saint,  and  our  misgivings  are  perfectly  right. 
The  first  is  not  a  heretic,  the  second  is  not  a  saint.  The 
first  may  be  a  saint  in  his  error,  the  second,  to  use  Milton's 
fine  phrase,  may  be  a  "  heretic  in  the  truth." 

Unless  we  hold  to  the  authority  of  the  lufalUble  Church, 
the  ecclesiastical  conception  of  the  sin  of  heresy  is  impos- 
sible. Unless  we  hold  that  all  truth  has  been  so  perfectly 
revealed  that  no  honest  mind  can  mistake  it  (and  who 
can  T)elieve  that  f ),  the  dogmatic  conception  of  heresy  fails. 
But  if  we  can  believe  in  the  conscience,  and  God's  willing- 
ness to  enlighten  it,  and  man's  duty  to  obey  its  judg- 
ments, the  moral  conception  of  heresy  sets  definitely  be- 
fore us  a  goodness  after  which  we  may  aspire,  and  a  sin 
which  we  may  struggle  against  and  avoid. 

In  ordinary  talk  men  will  call  him  a  heretic  who  departs 
from  a  certain  average  of  Christian  belief  far  enough  to 
attract  their  attention.  Men  will  speak  of  heresy  as  if  it 
were  synonymous  with  error.  It  may  be  that  the  word  is 
so  bound  up  with  old  notions  of  authoi'ity  that  it  must  be 
considered  obsolete,  and  can  be  of  little  further  use.  And 
yet  there  is  a  sin  which  this  word  describes,  which  it 
described  to  Paul  and  Augustine  and  Taylor — a  sin  as 
rampant  in  our  day  as  theirs.  It  is  the  self-will  of  the 
intellect.  It  is  the  belief  of  creeds,  whether  they  be  true 
or  false,  because  we  choose  them,  and  not  because  God 
declares  them.  It  is  the  saying,  "  I  w^ant  this  to  be  true," 
of  any  doetriue,  so  vehemently  that  w^e  forget  to  ask,  "  Is 
it  true  ? "  When  we  do  this,  we  depart  from  the  Christian 
Church,  which  is  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  the  disciple- 
ship  of  Christ.  With  the  danger  of  that  sin  before  our 
eyes,  remembering  how  often  w^e  have  committed  it,  feel- 
ing its  temptation  ever  present  with  us,  we  may  still  pray 
with  all  our  hearts,  "From  heresy,  good  Lord,  deliver 
us." 


THE     BEST    METHODS    OF    PROMOTING    SPIR- 
ITUAL   LIFE. 

(Second  Congi-ess  of   Protestant   Episcopal   Church,  Philadelphia, 
November  12,   1875.) 

I  AM  asked  to  write  of  the  best  methods  of  promoting 
spiritual  life.  I  take  it  for  granted  that  it  is  the  personal 
life  that  is  referred  to,  the  culture  of  the  single  soul.  It 
is  not  the  question  of  the  sources  and  career  of  those 
great  movements  of  spiritual  life  which  agitate  a  whole 
community ;  not  the  question  of  revival  meetings  and  all 
the  circumstances  of  religious  awakenings  ;  but  it  is  that 
old  question  of  the  soul  asking  itself,  "■  How  can  I  best 
live  near  to  God  ?  "  It  is  no  question  for  controversies.  I 
think,  however  mucli  we  differ  upon  other  things,  we  can 
very  largely  come  together  here,  and  at  this  last  meeting 
of  our  Congress  seem  to  each  other  to  be  not  merely 
members  of  the  same  Church,  taking  different  views  of 
our  Church's  life,  but  fellow-Christians  fuU  of  one  strong 
sympathy,  one  common  desire  to  be  more  worthy  of  our 
Lord  and  live  more  truly  the  life  of  God  on  earth. 

There  is  something  almost  like  the  creak  of  machinery 
about  our  subject.  We  want  to  get  that  out  and  leave 
it  all  behind.  There  are  no  rules  which,  taken  together, 
make  up  the  directory  by  which  one  may  live  spiritually, 
and  which  may  be  called  the  method  of  spiritual  life. 
Life  makes  its  own  methods.  The  very  fact  that  it  is 
vital  promises  for  it  variety.  What  I  want  to  do,  if  I  can, 
in  this  paper,  is  to  indicate  the  true  character  of  spiritual 

20 


METHODS   OF  FEOMOTING  SFIEITUAL  LIFE.         21 

life  in  itself,  and  its  true  relations  to  this  world  iu  wLicli 
"vve  live.  If  we  can  understand  these  two  things,  rules 
will  spring  as  naturally  as  the  plant  always  springs  when 
the  good  seed  falls  rightly  into  good  ground,  with  fit 
differences  in  different  fields. 

We  start  then  with  this,  that  the  spii-itual  life  of  man 
in  its  fullest  sense  is  the  activity  of  man's  whole  nature 
under  the  highest  spii'itual  impulse,  viz.,  the  love  of  God. 
It  is  not  the  activity  of  one  set  of  powers,  one  part  of 
the  nature.  It  is  the  movement  of  all  the  powers,  of  the 
whole  of  his  nature  under  a  certain  force,  and  so  ^\dth  a 
certain  completeness  and  effect.  This  friend  of  mine  is 
an  unspii'itual  man.  What  does  this  mean  ?  That  there 
are  some  closets  in  his  life  which  he  has  never  opened  ? 
One  field  of  his  nature  that  lies  unemployed  ?  One  kind 
of  action  that  he  never  does  ?  No ;  but  it  really  means 
that  behind  all  his  actions  there  is  at  work,  not  the  higher, 
but  some  lower  force ;  not  the  love  of  God,  but  the  love  of 
himself,  or  an  interest  in  his  brethren.  To  make  him 
spiritual  what  must  one  do  ?  Not  merel}^  open  new  cham- 
bers of  life  to  him,  so  that,  besides  being  what  he  is  now, 
a  thinker,  a  father,  a  lawyer,  he  shall  be  also  a  spiritual 
man,  adding  one  more  life  to  the  many  lives  which  he 
lives  already.  One  must  put  behind  all  these  lives  some 
power  of  spiritual  force  and  unity,  by  whose  inflow  they 
shall  be  altered,  elevated,  and  redeemed.  How  to  do  this, 
how  to  bring  all  the  life  into  connection  with  the  spiritual 
force,  and  then  to  open  it  more  and  more  completely  to 
its  power,  this  is  the  question  of  the  methods  of  sj)iritiial 
life. 

It  would  seem,  then,  as  if  in  the  j^roduction  and  com- 
pletion of  the  spiritual  man  there  were  three  points  or 
stages  which,  in  our  thoughts  at  least,  are  capable  of 
separation.  There  is  the  gathering  of  spiritual  force  out- 
side of  a  nature,  seeking  admission ;  there  is  the  admit- 


22  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

tance  of  that  force  through  the  willing  assent  of  the  na- 
ture itself ;  and  then  there  is  the  occupation  of  the  nature 
by  the  force,  as  it  finds  out  the  use  of  all  its  least  machi- 
neries, and  stirs  the  whole  of  it  to  action.  It  is  like  the 
way  in  which  the  sunlight  enters  youi-  shuttered  house 
each  morning.  There,  too,  there  are  three  separable  times 
— one  while,  the  sun  fully  risen,  the  sunlight  waits  out- 
side ready  to  enter,  but  not  yet  in ;  another  when  you 
open  the  window  and  fling  the  shutter  back;  and  yet 
another  while  the  admitted  sunlight  takes  possession  of 
your  house,  springs  from  object  to  object,  and  from  room 
to  room,  and  summons  the  color  and  the  life  back  to  the 
dull  and  sleepy  things  it  touches.  Or  shall  we  say  it  is 
like  the  clear,  distinguishable  moments  when  the  vital 
steam  waits  throbbing  in  its  boiler,  when  you  turn  the 
screw  that  admits  it  to  your  engine,  and  when  its  force 
slowly  spreads  through  all  your  engine's  bulk  till  every 
great  limb  slowly  heaves  and  every  little  needle  trembles 
and  tingles  with  the  pervading  life  ? 

Now  of  the  fii"st  two  of  these  thi-ee  periods,  so  separable 
in  our  thoughts,  but  so  blending  in  actual  experience,  we 
are  not  called  upon  to  say  much  here.  The  force  of  all 
spiritual  life  is  the  love  of  God  for  man.  Blindly  or 
clearly  known,  a  divine  life  over  us,  which  cares  for  us,  is 
at  the  beginning  of  spirituality  in  man.  The  Christian 
has  the  assurance  of  that  love,  made  in  the  Incarnation, 
certified  upon  the  cross,  to  put  it  past  all  doubt  and  make 
it  infinitely  full  of  powerful  appeal  to  him.  But  g-uessed 
at  by  the  blindest  heathen  or  rejoiced  in  by  the  strongest 
Christian  faith,  that  love  of  God  is  final  in  the  history  of 
spiritual  life.  Behind  it  man  cannot  go.  Man  does  no 
more  to  bring  it  there  where  it  stands  waiting  for  him  to 
let  it  in  than  he  does  to  gather  the  morning  light  out  of 
the  midnight  darkness  and  set  it  outside  the  closed  shut- 
ters of  his  darkened  house.     The  love  of  God  for  man  is 


METHODS   OF  PROMOTING   SPIRITUAL   LIFE.         23 

the  fact  that  lies  back  of  everything ;  the  lake  on  the  calm 
summit  of  the  hill  above  the  clouds,  out  of  'which  all  the 
streams  flow  do"\vn. 

Aud  so  too  of  the  act  by  which  man  opens  his  life  to 
this  love  of  God  for  him.  It  is  the  time  when  that  love 
of  God  for  him  is  responded  to  by  a  love  of  his  for  God. 
It  is  not  ours  to  try  the  delicate  and  difficult  untwisting 
of  those  cords  of  divine  influence  and  human  will  which 
so  cHng  to  and  love  each  other.  Enough  that,  tempted 
by  God,  a  man  does  open  his  nature  to  this  waiting  love. 
That  which  had  stood  outside  as  persuasive  fact  comes 
into  the  life  as  powerful  motive,  and  then  the  spiritual 
life  is  begun. 

We  come  then  to  the  third  period,  the  occupation  of  the 
nature  by  this  spiritual  force  of  the  love  of  God :  its  grad- 
ual entry  as  motive  into  all  the  circle  of  the  life.  All  that 
a  man  can  do  to  make  that  occupation  more  complete  is  a 
method  of  spiritual  life.  What  he  can  do  seems  to  me  to 
be  really  divisible  under  three  or  four  very  simple  heads. 
He  can,  in  the  fii-st  place,  insist  on  cutting  off  and  casting 
away  those  parts  of  his  life  into  which  it  is  impossible, 
by  the  very  nature  of  the  things,  that  this  new  spii-itual 
force  should  enter.  -  Here  is  the  field  of  self-denial.  He 
can  give  up  every  bad  habit  which  is  incapable  of  regen- 
eration and  occupation  by  the  Spirit  of  God.  Then,  turn- 
ing to  those  parts  of  his  life  which  this  new  force  can  fill 
and  use,  he  can  do  much  to  make  them  ready  for  its  occu- 
pancy. This  he  can  do  by  clearing  and  enlarging  them, 
which  means  by  attaining  to  the  ideal  conception  of  them, 
and  by  faithfully  exercising  them.  Is  it  not  true  that  any 
man  makes  his  trade  or  occupation  ready  to  be  filled  by 
the  high  motive  of  the  love  of  God  when  he  trains  himself 
to  look  at  his  trade  or  occupation  in  its  ideal,  and,  at  the 
same  time,  is  thoroughly  conscientious  in  its  duties  ?  The 
shoemaker  who,  ha\'ing  opened  his  heart  to  God's  love, 


24  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

comes  soonest  and  fiJlest  to  find  the  work  of  Ms  lap-stone 
and  his  bench  touched  and  inspired  by  that  motive  will 
be  the  shoemaker  who  most  conceives  of  his  daily  work 
as  one  connected  with  human  comfort  and  strength,  and 
who,  at  the  same  time,  is  most  conscientiously  faithful  to 
its  details.  These  things  a  man  can  do  :  he  can  resolutely 
abandon  the  sins  which  cannot  be  si3iritualized ;  he  can 
open  all  the  channels  of  his  life  to  spirituality  by  the  study 
of  the  ideal,  and  by  faithful  work  in  every  part  of  his 
living.  One  is  the  turning  out  of  strangers ;  the  other  is 
the  preparing  of  the  chambers  for  the  entering  guest.  The 
one  is  negative,  the  other  positive.  When  both  are  done, 
then  the  man  who  has  learned  in  one  little  spot,  the  con- 
version spot  of  his  nature,  that  God  loves  him,  and  who 
has  there  begun  to  love  God,  may  look  to  see  that  new 
motive  run  into  these  newly  opened  chambers  of  his  life, 
making  the  half -ready  places  completely  ready  by  its  pres- 
ence, freeing  the  half -freed  machinery  by  its  touch. 

Does  this  mean  anything  ?  Is  it  capable  of  being  made 
clear?  I  think  it  is.  Here  is  your  average  religious  man, 
spiritual  in  some  regions  of  his  life,  in  the  region  of  prayer, 
in  the  region  of  worship.  He  wants  to  be  more  spiritual. 
How  can  he  do  it  ?  He  can  grow  deeper  in  religious  life 
only  by  becoming  more  widely  religious.  He  can  hold 
more  of  the  Spirit  of  God  by  opening  new  sections  of  his 
life.  Greater  depth  will  come  only  with  greater  wideness. 
The  true  advance  for  that  man  to  make  is  not  simply  to 
be  more  religious  right  there  where  he  is  religious  already ; 
it  is  to  be  religious  where  he  is  irreligious  now,  to  let  the 
spiritual  force  which  is  in  him  play  upon  new  activities. 
How  shall  he  open,  for  instance,  his  business  life  to  this 
deep  power?  B3'  casting  out  of  his  business  all  that  is 
essentially  wicked  in  it,  by  insisting  to  himself  on  its 
ideal  of  charity  or  usefulness,  on  the  loftiest  conception  of 
every  relationship  into  which  it  brings  him  with  his  fel- 


METHODS   OF  PROMOTING   SPIRITUAL  LIFE.         25 

low-man,  and  hj  making  it  not  a  matter  of  his  own  w^liim 
or  choice,  bnt  a  duty  to  be  done  faithfully  because  God 
has  called  hhn  to  it.  All  of  these  can  come  only  with  a 
firm,  devout  conviction  that  God  chose  for  him  his  work, 
and  meant  for  him  to  find  his  sj)iritual  education  there. 
Doing-  all  these,  in  every  department  of  his  life,  with  the 
single  intention  that  the  love  of  God  which  is  already  in 
him  may  pervade  and  possess  these  regions  of  his  activ- 
ity, is  he  not  cultivating  his  own  spirituality?  Are  not 
these  the  best  methods  of  promoting  spiritual  life  ? 

I  dwell  upon  such  thoughts  as  these  because  they  seem 
to  me  to  indicate  the  truly  human  method  of  seeking  for 
spiritual  growth.  Do  not  catch  me  up  upon  the  word. 
I  mean  the  method  which  God  has  suited  to  the  nature  of 
His  human  creatures.  It  goes  back  for  the  warrant  of 
spirituality  to  that  first  fact  of  humanity  that,  in  the  im- 
age of  God,  God  created  man.  Starting  with  the  intrinsic 
capacity  of  man  to  receive  the  life  of  God,  all  spiritual 
growth  consists  in  the  more  and  more  complete  reception 
of  that  life.  For  its  reception  the  total  nature  must  be 
opened  to  its  widest.  That  nature  is  related  to  the  world 
around  it,  to  the  tasks  and  pleasures  which  offer  them- 
selves on  every  side.  In  the  exercise  of  these  relations 
from  low  and  wicked  motive  it  is  opened  to  low  and  wicked 
life.  In  the  exercise  of  these  same  relations  from  high  and 
spiritual  motive  it  is  opened  to  high  and  spiritual  hfe. 
That  is  the  simple  argument.  In  two  words,  it  conceives 
of  the  spiritual  vitahty  as  educated  primarily  in  the  spir- 
itual exercise  of  the  ordinary  relationship  between  a  man 
and  the  world  in  which  he  lives,  and  as  exhibiting  its  re- 
sults in  the  regeneration  and  purification  of  the  essential 
qualities  of  humanity.  I  called  it  the  human  method.  It 
stands  apart  from  two  other  great  conceptions  of  the  pro- 
motion of  the  spiritual  life.  It  is  different  from  mysticism 
on  the  one  hand,  and  from  ceremonialism  on  the  other. 


26  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

The  mystic,  iu  all  liis  varieties,  thinks  of  holiness  as  some- 
thing to  be  cultivated  not  by  the  contacts  of  life,  but  by 
the  pure  contemplation  of  God,  and  the  deeper  and  deeper 
realization  of  certain  sacred  relations  between  the  soul  and 
Him;  and  he  looks  for  the  manifestations  of  holiness  in 
certain  theosophic  consciousnesses  and  conditions  of  soul, 
quite  separate  in  kind  from  the  peculiar  movements  of 
our  human  nature.  The  ceremonialist  sees  the  true  cul- 
tui'e  of  holiness  in  certain  specified  acts,  in  obediences 
which  are  technical  and  arbitrary,  and  looks  for  the  re- 
sult of  religion  in  some  forms  of  professionally  religious 
life.  The  Quaker,  disowning  sacraments  altogether,  and 
the  devotee,  seeing  in  the  sacraments  acts  not  simply 
representative  of,  but  quite  distinct  from,  the  dependences 
and  obediences  of  common  daily  life — these  are  the  types. 
One  with  his  devotion  to  the  inner  experience,  the  other 
with  his  consecration  to  the  outward  exercise ;  both  have 
departed  from  this  human  concej^tion  of  spiritual  methods. 
One  makes  religion  meditation,  the  other  makes  religion 
discipline — asceticism,  in  the  meaning  tliat  is  indicated  by 
its  derivation.     But  religion  is  more  than  either :  it  is  life. 

The  mystic  and  the  ceremonialist  indeed  are  in  us  all. 
There  is  no  perfect  education  that  has  not  both  these  ele- 
ments in  it.  All  life  opens  into  the  machinery  of  cere- 
mony below,  and  into  the  abstractness  of  mysticism 
above ;  but  the  ordinary,  healthful,  life-giving  processes 
of  the  world  go  on,  neither  underground  nor  in  the  clouds, 
but  on  the  earth  in  the  light  of  day,  and  on  the  solid  soil. 
So,  all  men  who  live  the  full  life  will  have  their  hours  of 
mystical  experience,  and  will  sometimes  invoke  the  aid  of 
arbitrary  disciplines ;  but  theu'  real  culture  will  be  in  the 
daily  duties  of  their  hves,  and  will  show  its  res^^lt  in  the 
deepening  and  strengthening  of  those  primary  qualities  of 
humanity  which  all  men  recognize  and  honor. 

I  cannot  read  the  life  of  Jesus  without  feeling  that  it 


METHODS   OF  PROMOTING   SPIRITUAL  LIFE.         27 

was  to  this  human  culture  of  the  spiritual  life  that  He 
was  always  leading.  This  was  His  constant  struggle  with 
Pharisee  and  Saddueee.  Against  the  ceremonialist,  who 
would  have  asked  the  proof  of  His  holiness  in  punctilious 
obedience  to  the  law  of  Moses,  and  the  mystic,  who  would 
have  demanded  of  Him  utter  separation  from  the  things 
of  sense.  He  came  eating  and  drinking,  and  pointed  for 
the  proof  of  His  mission  to  works  of  mercy  and  the  daily 
intercourses  of  love.  He  asked  men  to  own  Him  as  their 
Lord,  because  He  showed  in  their  divine  completeness  the 
qualities,  and  filled  with  divine  perfeetness  the  relations,  of 
humanity.  That  was  the  power  of  the  Incarnation.  He 
appealed  directly  to  the  human  heart  to  understand  Him, 
with  its  native  perceptions  quickened  by  His  presence. 
''  Have  I  been  so  long  with  you,  and  hast  thou  not  known 
Me,  Philip?"  The  testimony  of  holiness  was  to  be  in 
deepened  humility,  patience,  truthfulness,  love,  the  old 
primeval  human  graces.  The  Christian  was  to  be  the 
perfect  man,  wrought  into  the  image  of  God  again  through 
the  obedience  of  the  Son  of  Man.  That  was  Christ's 
power;  and  the  Bible,  again  and  again,  takes  the  same 
tone,  and  makes  the  process  of  redemption  to  be  the  re- 
generation of  man  into  his  true  self  by  the  faithful  use 
and  treatment  of  the  world  in  the  obedience  and  love  of 
G-od.  Every  perversion  of  practical  religion  has  been  by 
the  loss  of  the  idea  of  this  human  culture  in  one  or  other 
of  the  two  directions  of  which  I  have  spoken. 

Let  me  point  out  what  seem  to  me  to  be  some  of  the 
benefits  which  come  from  as  complete  an  association  as 
possible  between  the  processes  of  spiritual  growth  and 
the  natural  duties  and  relationships  of  human  life ;  from 
the  human  culture  of  holiness  by  life,  as  distinct  from  the 
mystic  culture  by  meditation  and  self -consciousness,  and 
the  ceremonial  culture  by  discipline  and  formal  rites. 

First,  think  of  its  continuity.     In  all  artificial  religious- 


28  ASSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

ness,  all  that  is  not  bound  to  life,  educated  through  life, 
and  uttering  itself  in  life,  there  are  gaps  and  breaks.  It 
is  the  sadness  of  every  Christian  experience ;  the  loveless 
times  between  the  moments  of  ecstatic  apprehension ;  the 
total  secularness  between  the  points  of  religious  perform- 
ance. One  of  two  things  must  come :  either  that  terrible 
separation  between  the  religious  and  the  secular  regions 
of  our  life,  which  is  the  ordinary  condition  of  religious 
people,  or  the  hopeless  attempt  to  narrow  the  life  down  to 
that  limited  range  of  feeling  or  behavior  in  which  alone 
is  any  chance  of  religion  contemplated.  The  Spirit  of 
God,  expected  only  at  certain  seasons  and  by  certain 
doors,  finds  sometimes  those  doors  closed,  and  no  welcome 
waiting  Him  at  any  other.  It  is  only  when  we  know  that 
any  door  capable  of  admitting  any  influence  may  admit 
the  blessed  influence  of  God,  only  then  can  we  be  hopeful 
of  keeping  the  breadth  and  variety  of  life,  and  at  the 
same  time  of  always  receiving  the  culture  and  the  grace 
of  God.  Let  only  the  western  shutters  be  open,  and  we 
shall  only  see  the  setting  sun.  Let  all  the  windows  be 
unclosed  and  expectant,  and  from  sunrise  round  to  sunset 
there  shall  be  no  interval  in  the  unbroken  light.  The  sun, 
in  the  com-se  of  the  day,  will  look  into  them  all. 

And  again,  with  this  vital  or  human  culture  of  holiness 
there  belongs  the  thought  of  the  variety  of  the  spiritual 
life :  fii'st  its  variety  in  the  individual  experience,  and 
then  the  variety  among  the  differing  lives  of  various 
Christians.  We  have  all  read  the  biographies  of  mj^stics 
and  ascetics,  and  felt  how  monotonous  they  were;  and 
then  we  liave  read  the  story  of  some  human  Christian, 
whose  holiness  was  trained  through  the  activities  of  a 
bus}^  life,  and  uttered  itself  in  the  deepened  and  purified 
human  qualities,  and  how  varied  that  seemed,  what  play 
and  movement  there  was  in  it.  The  pietist's  contempla- 
tions and  the  ceremonialist's  rites  are  the  same  from  day 


METHODS   OF  PROMOTIXG   SPIIUTUAL   LIFE.         29 

to  day,  and  in  all  men.  They  lose  the  rich,  personal,  rare, 
and  true  distinctions  of  mankind.  Their  methods  of  saint- 
hood give  to-day  no  new  character  beyond  yesterday,  and 
the  nineteenth  centnry  no  difference  from  the  foiu'teenth. 
But  if  religion  be  cultivated  in  the  doing  of  our  utterly 
different  works,  and  declare  itself  in  the  renewal  of  each 
man's  own  personality,  then  every  man  and  every  age  will 
utter  the  spiritual  life  in  some  vernacular  and  color  of 
its  own ;  and  each  will  bear  witness  of  itself  that  it  is 
Christ's,  by  the  way  in  which  Christ  has  emphasized  its 
special  character. 

And  again,  by  becoming  more  bound  in  with  human 
life  the  spiritual  culture  becomes  more  intelligible,  and  so 
more  influential  to  the  world  around  us.  Our  devotion, 
like  our  doctrine,  seems  utterly  incomprehensible  to  half 
the  men  we  meet.  It  seems  to  be  perfectly  technical — 
the  thing  for  people  of  a  certain  make,  as  music  is  for 
men  with  ears  for  harmony,  and  painting  is  for  men  with 
eyes  for  color.  There  is  hardly  anything  more  trying  to 
the  Christian  sense  than  the  phrase  "  the  religious  public," 
as  describing  one  set  or  section  of  the  community.  What 
could  interpret  this  unknown  life  to  men  ?  Nothing  so 
strongly  as  a  really  human  way  of  cultivating  and  living 
it  upon  the  part  of  those  other  men  who  are  called  Chris- 
tians. To  see  that  you  are  growing  holy  through  contact 
with  the  same  things  that  make  them  wicked,  and  that 
by  being  holy  you  bring  to  their  true  depth  and  luster 
those  qualities  which,  faded  and  dull,  they  honor  still 
among  themselves,  that  is  the  strongest  influence  which 
can  go  forth  from  you  to  make  your  brethren  rise  up  and 
go  with  you  to  God. 

But,  perhaps,  most  of  all  it  is  the  reality  of  the  great 
life-culture  of  holiness  that  gives  it  its  value.  The  spirit- 
ual experience  grows  so  unreal  to  us.  The  earthly  things 
we  seek  stand  out  so  sharp  and  clear.     The   heavenly 


30  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

things  are  so  intangible  and  vagne.  It  is  not  enongli  to 
point  to  tlie  weakness  of  oui*  spiritual  natui-e.  There  is 
something  wrong  about  our  method,  that  to  us,  laymen 
and  ministers,  the  dear  and  solemn  things  of  God  so  often 
seem  vague  and  intangible.  Is  it  not  largely  that  religion 
stands  so  far  apart  from  life,  that  the  methods  of  spiritual 
growth  do  not  seem  to  lie  in  these  common  things  and 
tasks  of  every  daj^,  and  that  the  fruits  of  spiritual  hfe — 
joy,  peace,  righteousness — do  not  seem  to  be  the  perfection 
of,  but  something  quite  of  another  kind  from,  the  joy 
and  peace  and  righteousness  with  which  we  are  familiar 
among  men? 

What  is  this  world  for,  and  what  are  these  human  rela- 
tionships trying  to  do  ?  Let  me  say,  very  earnestly,  that 
that  is  the  question  which  has  underlain  a  very  large  part 
of  the  difficulties  with  which  we  have  dealt  this  week.  It 
is  the  sense  that  that  question  is  not  answered  in  our 
churches ;  that  the  Church  is  not  set  forth  to  be  the  ideal 
of  human  being,  which  keeps  the  masses  from  our  minis- 
try. It  is  the  consciousness  that  the  Christian  life  which 
they  are  expected  to  proclaim  and  train  is  artificial  and 
unhuman  that  keeps  many  nol)le  young  men  from  our 
ministry.  It  is  a  technicalness  creeping  up  from  our 
fundamental  conceptions  of  religion  into  our  tunes  and 
hymns  that  paralyzes  our  Church  music.  Nothing  but  a 
forgetfulness  of  the  largeness  of  the  ideal  Christianity  as 
a  world-embracing  power  could  have  bred  the  vices  or  the 
dangers  of  our  Church  government.  AU  the  narrow  lim- 
itations of  the  great  preaching  power  have  then-  deep- 
est root  in  some  mechanical,  unhuman  notion  of  religious 
life.  Out  of  this  have  come  the  false  and  superstitious 
notions  of  the  Bible  which  complicate  the  question  of  revi- 
sion. And,  remembering  the  discussions  of  this  morning, 
it  becomes  us  most  seriously  to  inquire  whether  the  Chris- 
tian's frequent  forgetfulness  of  the  true  purpose  of  this 


METHODS   OF  PROMOTING   SPIRITUAL   LIFE.         31 

earth  and  all  the  relations  that  grow  out  of  it,  as  the  min- 
isters of  the  spiritual  cultm-e  of  humanity — his  failure  to 
claim  for  it  its  profoundest  relations  to  his  soul  and  God 
— has  not  had  much  to  do  with  the  starthng  agitation  of 
the  question  whether  the  earth  has  a  purpose,  and  beyond 
this,  whether  that  soul  and  that  God,  which  claimed  so 
little  from  and  laid  so  little  hold  upon  the  great  clear 
world  and  its  relationships,  were  more  themselves  than 
dreams. 

The  family,  the  social  life,  the  school,  the  shop — we 
dread  and  deplore  the  godlessness  that  often  seems  to  be 
taking  possession  of  them.  But  has  it  no  connection  with 
the  neglect  or  the  refusal  of  rehgious  men  to  see  in  them 
the  true  cultui"e  places  of  their  profoundest  piety,  and 
with  their  unwilHngness  thoughtfully  to  ask  if  the  religion 
which  conceives  of  itself  as  an  aggregate  of  such  qualities 
as  these  places  have  no  education  for,  is  not  erroneously, 
imperfectly  conceiving  of  itself?  The  home,  school,  and 
shop  must  be  here  on  the  fairest  hillsides  and  plains  of 
the  world  for  something.  If  we  will  not  claim  them  for 
their  best  use,  and  by  our  use  of  them  exalt  them  to  their 
best  explanations,  we  need  not  wonder  at  the  low  and 
godless  explanations  which  men  give  of  them.  When  we 
are  willing  to  see  in  them  the  ministi-ations  of  God ;  when 
men,  asking  us  for  the  means  of  grace,  are  pointed,  fii'st 
of  all,  to  the  duties  and  relations  of  their  lives  as  the 
places  where  they  will  meet  God,  where  they  will  find  the 
deepest  experiences,  conviction  of  sin,  utter  humility,  the 
need  of  Christ,  and  the  ideal  of  holiness — then  how  the  dead 
earth  and  all  that  is  upon  it  will  glow  with  a  fire  that  no 
materialism  can  quench.  Till  then,  so  long  as  we  fail  to 
use  the  world  for  spiritual  culture,  no  wonder  it  be  dead ; 
and  who  cares  whether  the  dead  thing  sprang  from  the 
hand  of  a  creator  or  took  shape  out  of  chaos  by  a  force  as 
dead  as  itself  ? 


32  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

The  final  spiritual  state  of  man  is  pictured  as  a  heavenly 
city,  a  place  of  thousand  relationships  springing-  out  of  his 
human  nature.  The  training-place  of  his  spu'itual  life 
must  be  a  city,  a  place  of  many  relationships  as  well.  And 
the  soul  touched  by  God  must  hear  what  Paul  heard :  "  Gro 
into  the  city,  and  it  shall  be  told  thee  what  thou  shalt  do." 

Continuity,  variety,  influence,  reality — these  are  the 
things  after  which  om'  spiritual  life  is  hungering  and 
thirsting.  To  grow  spasmodic,  monotonous,  uninfluen- 
tial,  unreal,  is  not  this  the  familiar  death  of  the  spiritual 
life  that  saddens  many  a  closet  and  many  a  church  ? 

I  know  full  well  the  shallow  look  which  may  be  given 
to  all  that  I  have  said.  I  know  that  I  may  have  seemed 
to  set  forth  a  superficial  gospel  of  activity  and  work,  too 
thin  to  hold  any  of  the  deep  joys  or  sorrows,  the  infinite 
fears  and  hopes  of  the  human  heart  touched  by  the  finger 
and  slowly  moving  on  into  the  life  and  peace  of  God.  But 
I  have  not  meant  that,  and  I  do  not  think  that  I  have 
said  it.  I  have  not  said  superficially  that  to  labor  is  to 
pray.  Prayer  lies  behind  all ;  but  I  am  sure  that  by  the 
finite  act  of  labor  the  infinite  act  of  prayer  is  helped  to 
its  completeness,  as  the  soul  grows  by  the  body's  minis- 
tries to  its  perfect  life.  Labor  which  is  conscious  of  min- 
istering to  prayer — that  is,  of  giving  the  soul  deeper  per- 
ceptions of  God  and  of  itself — grows  proud  of  and  rich 
in  its  mission.  It  catches  much  of  the  loftiness  of  prayer 
itself.  It  goes  enthusiastically  and  buoyantly  upon  its 
way,  sowing  the  spiritual  life,  as  the  disciples  went  up  the 
road  to  Sychar  to  buy  bread  for  Jesus  while  He  sat  wait- 
ing by  the  well. 

It  is  evident  enough  that  for  such  a  method  of  promot- 
ing spiritual  life  as  I  have  dwelt  upon  there  is  no  set  of 
rules  to  be  put  forth.  No  manual  of  devotion  and  no 
practice  of  any  drill  will  bring  about  that  healthy  relation 
to  all  life  which  shall  make  it  all  minister  to  godliness. 


METHODS   OF  PROMOTING   SPIRITUAL   LIFE.         33 

Faithfulness  in  the  work  of  men  for  the  fear  and  love  of 
God — what  rules  can  one  give  for  that  except  the  rule  of 
ceaseless  vigilance  and  perfect  humility  ?  But  this  is  evi- 
dent, that  if  the  Church  in  every  age  had  bound  the  out- 
ward life  to  the  inward  experience,  and  declared  righteous- 
ness to  be  the  true  culture  of  faith,  she  would  have  been 
wiser  than  she  often  has  been  for  her  children's  spiritual 
life.  And  it  is  evident,  too,  that  any  revival  of  religion 
which  deals  only  with  the  emotional  experiences  or  with 
ritual  forms,  and  does  not  preach  the  culture  of  faith  by 
righteousness,  has  not  revived  religion  into  perfect,  per- 
manent vitahty.  And  it  is  evident,  too,  that  any  man 
seeking  to  be  holy  who  does  not  set  liimself  in  close,  live 
contact  with  the  life  about  him  stands  in  great  danger  of 
growing  pious  or  punctilious  instead  of  holy.  No  book 
or  discipline  that  separates  a  man  from  human  life  truly 
cultivates  his  spirituality.  The  noblest  book  of  devotion 
in  our  literature,  the  "  Holy  Living  "  of  Jeremy  Taylor,  has 
its  value  here,  that  it  is  neither  a  rhapsody  of  mystical  senti- 
ment nor  a  directorium  of  religious  behavior ;  but  a  simple, 
manly  effort  to  bring  the  highest  task  to  every  spiritual 
motive  and  the  highest  spiritual  motive  to  every  task. 

The  man  of  the  world,  as  we  call  him,  has  the  tasks  but 
not  the  spii'itual  motives.  The  Christian  has  the  spiritual 
motives  and  is  sometimes  ready  to  think  that  that  super- 
sedes and  makes  unnecessary  the  task.  There  comes  the 
strange  unfaithfulness  which  we  often  see  in  earnest  re- 
ligious people,  not  the  least  often  in  ministers.  But  it  is 
possible  for  the  man  full  of  God  to  meet  the  world  full  of 
God,  and  to  find  interpretations  and  revelations  of  his 
Master  everywhere.      The  Chvistian   finds   the  hand  of 

[Christ  in  everything,  and  by  the  faithful  use  of  everything 
for  Christ's  sake  he  takes  firm  hold  of  that  hand  of  Christ 
and  is  drawn  nearer  and  nearer  to  Himself.  That  is,  I 
think,  the  best  method  of  promoting  spiritual  life. 


THE   TEACHING   OF   RELIGION. 

(Divinity  School  of  Yale  University,  February  28,  1878.) 

A  YEAR  has  passed  away  since  I  had  the  satisfaetion  of 
meeting  you  liere  before — a  year  iu  which  we  have  all 
been  busy  in  doing  or  preparing  to  do  the  work  of  the 
Christian  ministry.  At  its  close  I  come  back  to  you  with 
a  deepened  sense  of  what  a  privilege  it  is  to  be  a  preacher^ 
and  witli  a  renewed  pleasure  and  gratitude  in  being  al- 
lowed to  address  those  who  are  making  ready  to  preach. 
I  come  at  the  kind  invitation  of  your  faculty  to  speak  to 
you  on  the  teaching  of  religion.  But  I  want  to  say  at 
once  that  I  should  not  venture  to  come  unless  I  might  be 
allowed  to  stand  in  precisely  the  same  position  toward 
you  in  which  I  stood  last  year.  I  am  no  professor  deal- 
ing wisely  with  the  philosophy  of  a  great  subject;  nor 
scholar  to  interpret  to  you  its  history.  I  am  simply  a 
working  minister,  ready  and  glad,  if  they  care  to  listen, 
to  tell  those  who  are  almost  ministers  how  the  problems 
of  religious  teaching  have  presented  themselves  to  my 
experience.  I  rely  entirely  upon  the  sympathy  of  our 
common  work.  It  is  more  in  suggestions  than  in  contin- 
uous and  systematic  treatise  that  I  shall  give  you  what  I 
have  to  say,  and  I  can  only  promise  you  in  recompense 
for  your  courteous  attention  that  I  will  tell  you  frankly 
and  honestly  just  how  the  work  of  teaching  religion  has 
seemed  to  me  as  I  have  labored  in  it. 

And  we  must  begin  with  definitions  which  need  not 
detain  us  very  long.     I  am  to  speak  about  the  teaching  of 

34 


THE   TEACHING    OF  EELKilOX.  35 

religion.  What  is  religion?  Religion  I  hold  to  be  the 
life  of  man  in  gratitnde  and  obedience  and  gradually  de- 
veloping likeness  to  God.  There  are  no  doubt  more  sub- 
tle definitions  to  be  given,  but  that  is  the  sum  of  it  all,  as 
it  stands  out  in  the  experience  of  men.  For  a  man  to  be 
religious  is  for  him  to  be  grateful  to  God  for  some  mercy 
and  goodness,  to  be  obedient  as  the  utterance  of  his  grati- 
tude, and  to  be  shaped  by  the  natural  power  of  obedience 
into  the  likeness  of  the  God  whom  he  obeys.  And  the 
Christian  religion — using  the  term  not  as  the  title  for  a 
scheme  of  truth  but  as  the  description  of  a  character — the 
Christian  religion  is  the  life  of  man  in  gratitude  and  obe- 
dience and  consequent  growing  likeness  to  God  in  Christ. 
A  Christian,  when  I  look  to  find  the  simplest  definition  of 
him  which  any  thoughtful  man  can  understand,  is  a  man 
who  is  trying  to  serve  Christ  out  of  the  grateful  love  of 
Christ,  and  who  by  his  service  of  Christ  is  becoming 
Christ-like.  It  is  not  simply  service,  for  service  may  be 
the  mere  slavery  of  fear,  and  that  is  superstition,  not 
religion.  It  is  not  simply  grateful  love,  for  that  may  ex- 
haust itself  as  a  mere  sentiment.  It  is  gratitude  assured 
by  obedience,  obedience  uttering  gratitude,  and  both  to- 
gether bearing  witness  of  themselves  and  accomplishing 
their  true  result  in  character.  The  life  of  man  in  grati- 
tude, obedience,  and  growing  likeness  to  Jesus  Christ,  as 
simple  as  that  let  us  make  and  keep  the  definition  of  the 
religion  in  which  we  live  ourselves,  to  which  we  tempt,  in 
which  we  try  to  instruct  our  fellow-men. 

And  now,  upon  this  essential  character  of  the  religion 
which  we  wish  to  teach  must  depend,  of  course,  the  possi- 
bility and  the  way  of  teaching  it.  But  notice  first  how 
out  of  vague  or  partial  ideas  about  what  religion  is,  there 
have  grown  up  and  have  been  always  present  among  re- 
ligious men  various  views  about  the  possibility  of  teaching 
religion  and  the  general  method  by  which,  if  such  teach- 


36  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

ing  were  possible,  it  must  proceed.  Such  views  in  general 
are  four. 

First,  there  is  the  disbeliever's  ■view.  I  do  not  mean 
the  man  who  disbelieves  in  religion,  but  the  man  who  dis- 
believes in  teaching  it.  Of  the  disbeliever  in  religion 
itself  we  can  say  nothing.  He  does  not  come  in  here.  Of 
course  he  cannot  believe  in  teaching  that  which  is  to  him 
a  fraud  or  a  mistake.  But  there  are  many  men,  them- 
selves religious,  to  whom  it  seems  a  full  impossibility  to 
teach  religion.  Many  of  such  men  are  thoroughly  devout 
and  earnest  souls.  Sometimes,  I  think,  the  very  intense- 
ness  of  their  personal  experience  makes  it  seem  to  them 
incapable  of  being  shared.  It  seems  as  if  every  man's 
religion  must  come  to  him  as  theirs  has  come  to  them, 
direct  from  God  Himself.  In  times  like  these  of  ours  in 
which  the  institutional  and  traditional  methods  of  religion 
are  shattered  and  disturbed,  there  are  many,  I  think,  who, 
driven  inward  from  the  tumiilt  and  distress  around  them, 
realizing  supremely  the  personalness  of  their  own  life 
with  Christ,  f eehng  how  little  they  were  led  to  it  or  upheld 
in  it  by  any  outward  influence,  distrust  such  outward  in- 
fluence for  any  man.  There  are  parents  who  feel  so  about 
their  children.  "  Let  them  be  taught  of  God,"  says  the 
devout  father.  "  Let  them  find  out  for  themselves,"  says 
the  undevout  father.  "  I  cannot  teach  them,"  says  each, 
"religion  is  unteachable.  It  is  too  personal.  It  is  not 
like  history  or  arithmetic.  There  is  a  notion  of  fate  about 
it.  The  soul  seems  to  be  like  the  sea-shore  rock  at  whose 
feet  the  tide  is  rising.  No  hand  can  bend  the  rock  to 
drink  the  water.  No  hand  can  lift  the  water  to  the  rock. 
Only  the  appointed  time  of  the  fidl  tide  can  bring  the  two 
together." 

I  must  not  stop  now  to  speak  about  this  first  conviction 
of  despair.  It  would  not  certainly  be  hard  to  point  out 
the  fallacy  of  such  an  exaggeration  of  the  personal  respon- 


THE    TEACHING    OE  BELIGIOS.  37 

sibility  as  woidd  forbid  au}'  most  kindly  and  sympathetic 
hand  to  help  it  see  the  task  it  has  to  do.  It  is  like  saying 
that  you  must  not  feed  a  child  gratuitously  because  the 
full-grown  man  is  bound  to  earn  his  own  bread.  The 
result  is  that  he  dies  a  baby. 

But  pass  on  and  see  what  are  the  suggestions  which 
come  from  various  persons  who  do  believe  that  religion 
is  teachable,  and  who  undertake  to  teach  it.  One  man, 
one  class  of  men,  taking  the  intellectual  idea  which  be- 
longs preeminently  to  that  word  "  teaching,"  think  of  re- 
ligious teaching  as  something  purely  intellectual.  It  is 
the  hard  method  of  the  hard  sort  of  Protestantism.  It  is 
the  method  of  the  catechism  and  the  doctrinal  sermon. 
We  shall  come  in  a  few  minutes  to  the  description  of  what 
part  it  has  to  play  in  the  full  religious  teaching  of  a  man. 
Notice  now  simpty  that  it  is  partial,  that  it  involves  a  very 
partial  notion  of  what  religion  is.  The  idea  that  religion 
has  been  taught  when  certain  truths  have  been  imparted, 
that  the  church  is  a  school-room  in  the  narrowest  sense, 
this  idea,  with  the  consequences  that  follow  from  it  of  the 
saving  power  of  the  tenure  of  right  beliefs,  was  far  more 
common  once  than  it  is  now.  It  belongs  to  every  era  of 
confessions  when  special  conditions  lead  to  the  m'aking  of 
minute  creeds.  The  very  dislike  which  this  idea  excites 
in  some  men's  minds,  the  violence  with  which  they  rail 
against  it,  is  one  sign  that  it  is  passing  away.  There  is  a 
certain  condition  of  the  ocean  which  is  neither  storm  nor 
calm.  It  shows  that  there  has  been  a  storm  where  we  are 
sailing  and  that  it  is  over.  And  there  are  persons  who 
suffer  more  with  seasickness  tliere  upon  the  dying  swell 
of  an  old  storm  than  when  the  fury  of  the  gale  is  all  about 
them.  So  there  are  many  wi*iters  on  religion  who  grow 
more  excited  over  the  honors  or  errors  of  some  system  of 
thought  that  is  in  decay  than  they  do  over  the  system 
which  is  vigorous  and  live  around  them.    They  are  always 


38  ASSAYS  AND  ADUli ESSES. 

full  of  indignation  about  the  shade  or  aspect  of  orthodoxy 
which  is  just  passing  out  of  sight.  And  you  can  tell  that 
an  idea  is  obsolescent  when  it  begins  to  vigorously  stir 
those  men's  dislike.  So  it  is  now  with  the  abuse  of  purely 
dogmatic  teaching  which  we  often  hear. 

Next  to  the  conception  of  religious  teaching  which 
thinks  of  it  solely  as  the  imparting  of  knowledge  comes 
that  whi(;h  dwells  entirely  on  the  creation  of  feeling.  This 
is  the  soft  Protestant  method  as  the  other  is  the  hard 
Protestant  method.  This  is  the  method  of  the  revivalist 
as  the  other  is  the  method  of  the  dogmatist.  Two  parish 
churches  stand  side  by  side  in  one  of  our  great  cities.  In 
their  pulpits  are  two  men,  both  teachers  of  religion,  both 
teachers  of  Christianity.  In  those  churches  are  gathered 
two  congrega.tions,  two  bodies  of  men  and  women  who 
have  l^ecome  assigned  to  those  two  churches  by  the  curi- 
ous, inexplicable,  seemingly  acicidental  processes  which  do 
decide  at  what  table  different  men  shall  eat  the  bread  of 
life.  In  those  two  churches  two  distinctly  different  works 
are  going  on.  In  one,  week  after  week,  year  after  year, 
men  are  being  taught  certain  ideas  as  if  the  work  for 
which  the  church  was  built  was  done  when  they  had 
learned  them.  In  the  other,  week  after  week,  year  after 
year,  men  are  being  stirred  up  to  feel  certain  feelings  as 
if  the  work  was  done  when  they  had  felt  them.  Two 
Christian  parents  training  their  children,  two  Sunday- 
school  teachers  teaching  their  classes,  two  missionaries 
going  out  to  India — everywhere  there  are  these  two  con- 
ceptions, the  intellectual  and  the  emotional,  side  by  side. 

And  then  another.  With  his  eye  fixed  peculiarly  on 
action,  looking  supremely  at  the  outward  life,  more  or  less 
clear  in  his  perceptions  of  its  strong  and  subtle  relations 
with  the  unseen  but  always  cognizant  first  of  that  which 
is  seen,  comes  the  third  teacher.  To  him  the  teaching  of 
religion  means  the  government  of  action.     His  method  is 


TEE   TEACHING    OF  BELIGION.  39 

drill.  No  longer  the  lecture-room  or  the  prayer-meeting, 
but  now  the  practical  sermon,  the  confessional,  the  scene 
of  spiritual  directorship,  where  one  man  tells  another  man 
just  wliat  he  ought  to  do.  You  see  how  far  we  have  come 
now  from  him  whom  we  saw  first  so  cognizant  of  the  per- 
sonal rights  and  privileges  of  his  brother's  soul  that  he 
thought  it  impossible  for  man  to  teach  his  fellow-man 
religion  at  all.  We  have  come  now  to  another  man  who 
does  not  scruple  to  take  the  delicate  machinery  of  his 
brother's  life  into  his  meddlesome  hands  and  move  it  as 
he  thinks  he  has  learned  from  his  own  experience  that 
human  lives  were  made  to  move.  Each  successive  method 
has  invaded  a  little  more  the  personality  of  the  scholar 
with  the  personality  of  the  teacher  than  the  one  that  went 
before  it.  You  overwhelm  a  man  more  when  you  flood 
him  with  your  emotion  than  when  you  enlighten  him  with 
your  wisdom.  But  you  claim  him  most  completely  away 
from  himself  when  you  give  him  a  law  and  say,  ''  Do  this," 
"  Do  that,"  neither  showing  him  the  deep  reason  nor  firing 
him  with  the  warm  impulse  for  doing  it. 

These  are  the  various  conceptions  which  men  have  of 
Avhat  it  is  to  teach  rehgion.  I  must  pass  by  the  idea  of 
those  who  think  that  it  is  totally  impossible,  though  I 
venture  to  hope  that  it  may  come  out  as  we  go  along  how 
even  their  supreme  and  often  beautiful  regard  for  the 
separate  personal  rights  of  every  soul  is  wholly  consistent 
with  what  we  shall  find  that  the  teaching  of  religion 
really  is.  But  take  only  the  three  who  do  believe  that 
it  is  possible  and  who  attempt  it  in  their  various  ways. 
They  stand  everywhere  side  by  side.  The  dogmatist,  the 
revivalist,  and  the  ecclesiastic,  as  we  may  freely  call  them. 
One  trying  to  teach  religion  as  truth,  another  trying  to 
excite  religion  as  feeling,  and  another  trying  to  enforce 
religion  as  law  or  drill.  There  is  no  age  where  all  three 
efforts  are  not  all  at  work ;  though  every  age  has  its  pref- 


40  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

erence  and  stamps  itself  with  some  peculiar  character,  is 
supremely  dogmatic  or  emotional  or  legal.  There  is  no 
church  which,  however  it  may  be  known  by  the  one  spirit, 
has  not  the  others  present  in  it  in  some  less  degree.  They 
so  belong  together  that  they  never  can  be  wholly  sepa- 
rated. And  yet  they  are  always  getting  out  of  perfect 
harmony  and  union,  and  the  faults  and  failiu'es  of  the 
teaching  of  religion  come  of  the  partial  conceptions  of 
what  religion  is,  of  its  conception  either  as  simply  truth, 
or  as  simply  emotion,  or  as  simply  law. 

And  what  is  religion?  We  come  back  once  more  to 
our  definition :  "  Religiou  is  the  hfe  of  man  in  gratitude 
and  obedience  and  consequent  growing  likeness  to  Jesus 
Christ."  Now  see  how  out  of  each  of  these  words  a 
line  starts  out  and  runs  to  something  behind  itself,  and 
see  how  all  those  lines  meet  in  a  person,  Jesus  Christ — 
"gratitude  to,"  "obedience  to,"  "likeness  to  Jesus  Christ." 
Gratitude,  obedience,  resemblance — these  are  the  windows 
through  which  the  personality  of  Jesus  Clu-ist  conies  to 
the  personality  of  men.  After  all,  then,  our  definition 
of  religion  is  but  a  description  of  means  and  processes. 
There  is  something  yet  more  essential,  that  to  which  the 
means  minister,  that  for  which  they  exist.  The  purpose 
at  least  of  the  awakening  of  gratitude  and  obedience  is 
the  bringing  of  Christ  to  men.  Religion,  the  Christian 
religion — once  again  to  give  it  a  simpler  because  a  pro- 
founder  definition — is  the  life  of  Christ  in  the  life  of  man, 
and  the  teaching  of  religion,  of  the  Christian  religion,  in 
its  largest  statement,  is  the  bringing  of  the  life  of  Christ 
into  the  life  of  man. 

I  speak  from  the  point  of  view  not  of  theory,  but  of 
practice.  I  speak  as  a  working  minister  w^ho  has  sought, 
as  every  working  minister  must  seek,  for  some  conception 
of  his  work  which  should  most  completely  cover  all  of  its 
demands  and  most  constantly  summon  all  his  powers  to 


THE   TEACHING    OF  BELIGIOX.  41 

do  it.  Every  man  in  every  work  needs  some  such  con- 
trolling' idea  under  which  all  details  of  method  can  be 
harmonized.  It  keeps  the  largeness  of  a  man's  labor.  It 
saves  him  from  the  danger  of  first  thinking  there  is  only 
one  wa}^  to  do  his  work,  and  then  narrowing  his  work  to 
the  possibilities  of  that  single  method.  And  now  what  is 
this  primary  comprehensive  conception  of  the  religious 
teacher's  work  which  grows  in  the  mind  of  the  Christian 
minister  through  many  years  of  work  ?  I  answer  without 
hesitation.  It  is  the  personal  conception.  It  is  the  notion 
that  his  task  consists  in  bringing  the  personal  Christ  to 
the  personal  human  nature,  to  the  human  soul.  I  am 
sure  that  the  highest  delight  and  the  highest  effect  of  a 
man's  preaching  comes  just  in  the  degree  in  which  all  the 
circumstances  of  his  work — first  its  great  perpetual  de- 
partments, the  instruction  in  doctrine,  the  awakening  of 
feeling,  the  enforcement  of  law ;  and  then  all  its  miniite 
details,  the  methods  of  preaching,  the  habits  of  study, 
the  ways  of  parish  government,  the  relationships  to  in- 
dividuals— all  find  their  dignity,  their  interpretation,  their 
urgency,  and  their  harmony  with  one  another,  by  being 
included  in  one  simple  conception  of  the  total  mission  of 
the  preacher  which  is  never  lost  and  n-ever  allowed  to 
grow  dim,  the  conception  of  a  personal  introduction  of 
person  to  person,  of  the  teacher  by  ever}'-  means  in  his 
power  making  real  and  influential  the  personality  of  Jesus 
Christ  upon  the  personalities  of  the  men  whom  he  is  teach- 
ing. Forgive  me  if  I  dwell  on  this,  and  tty,  by  mere  re- 
iteration, to  make  you  feel  how  important  it  seems  to  me. 
It  is  what  I  have  come  here  to  urge  upon  you.  It  is 
what  to  me  makes  the  whole  secret  of  a  happy,  earnest, 
and  successful  ministry.  The  minister  who  has  reached 
and  holds  always  the  simplest  picture  of  what  his  minis- 
try means,  that  he  is  to  make  the  personal  Christ  known 
to  men,  in  the  same  way,  in  the  same  sense,  only  with 


42  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

infinitely  more  of  responsibility  and  joy  than  that  with 
which  one  man  makes  his  brother  know  another  man  who 
has  helped  him  and  who  he  knows  may  help  them  both  ; 
the  minister  to  whom  this  picture  of  his  work  in  life  is 
always  clear,  to  whom  all  the  duties  and  circumstances  of 
his  ministry  play  within  this  picture,  giving  it  vividness, 
but  never  making  it  confused  and  dim — he  is  the  preacher 
in  every  land,  in  every  age,  who  really  teaches  men  relig- 
ion. It  is  that  picture  lying  distinct  in  the  preacher's 
mind  that  gives  to  many  a  sermon  which  seems  most  ab- 
stract its  vividness  and  power.  It  is  the  absence  of  that 
picture  that  weakens  and  scatters  the  force  of  the  ministry 
of  mau}^  an  able  and  earnest  man,  and  makes  his  careful 
arguments  wearisome,  and  his  impassioned  appeals  like  so 
much  very  distant  thunder. 

Look  at  the  ministry  of  the  Lord  Himself,  and  see  how 
clear  this  is.  Jesus  preached  Himself,  not  in  the  second- 
ary, modern  sense  of  giving  definitions  of  His  nature,  and 
theories  of  His  history ;  He  set  His  self  before  men  and . 
bid  them  feel  the  power  that  came  out  from  Him  to  all 
who  were  receptive  with  that  personal  receptiveness  which 
He  called /h/7/i.  All  that  was  dimly  but  majestically  real 
to  men  in  what  they  knew  of  Grod's  personal  creatorship 
and  personal  governorship  of  the  world,  all  that  was 
familiar  to  them  in  their  daily  domestic  experience  of 
friendship,  all  this  came  to  its  clear  and  consummate  ex- 
hibition when  Jesus  stood  forth  on  that  pedestal  of  Jew- 
ish life  which  seemed  so  obscure,  and  has  proved  to  be  so 
high,  and  uttered  those  sublime  personal  announcementb' 
of  himself :  "  I  am  the  Light  of  the  world ;  "  ''I  am  the 
Bread  of  Life ;  "  "I  am  the  Way,  and  the  Truth,  and  the 
Life  ;  "  "  Come  unto  Me."  We  wonder  sometimes  at  what 
there  is  in  Christianity  which  there  is  not  in  the  four  Gos- 
pels. What  is  the  difference  between  our  Christianity  and 
that  of  Christ's  disciples?     Doctrines,  types  of  feeling, 


THE   TEACHING    OF  RELIGION.         "  43 

standards  of  conduct,  made  tests  of  Christian  life  to  such 
degi-ee  that  it  seems  almost  certain  that  the  Apostles  of 
Jesus,  for  all  that  we  know  of  them  in  the  Gospels,  could 
only  dubiously  and  by  a  stretch  of  charity  be  admitted  as 
members  of  an.  evangelical  church  in  America  to-day.  But 
the  main  difference  is  not  in  what  has  been  added  but  in 
what  has  been  lost.  It  is  the  weakening  and  dimming  of 
the  personal  picture  of  the  Gospels,  with  the  consequent 
loss  of  the  idea  of  loyalty  as  the  test  of  Christian  condi- 
tion, that  has  allowed  the  doctrinal,  the  emotional,  and  the 
legal  aspects  of  Christian  life,  which  all  have  their  place 
within  the  personal  idea,  and,  under  it,  live  in  absolute ' 
harmony,  to  come  up  into  a  prominence  and  often  into  a 
conflict  which  is  nowhere  in  the  Gospels. 

And  when  we  pass  outside  the  Gospels,  when  we  come 
to  the  earliest  Christian  teachers,  St.  Peter,  St.  Stephen, 
St.  Paul,  the  same  character  is  there  as  clear  as  possible. 
They  declare  truth,  they  appeal  to  feeling,  they  challenge 
the  conscience,  they  play  on  the  whole  range  of  human 
nature,  but  always  everything  is  within  the  circuit  and 
comprehension  of  the  friendship,  the  mastery,  the  brother- 
hood of  Jesus  Christ.  It  is  always  the  "  simplicity  that  is 
in  Chiist "  that  blends  the  multiplicity  which  is  in  Chris- 
tian teaching.  The  range  and  freedom  of  thought,  emo- 
tion, action,  is  secured  by  the  perpetual  assured  preemi- 
nence of  the  personal  Christ.  It  is  where  the  Spirit  of 
the  Lord  is  that  there  is  liberty.  Back  and  forth  over 
land  and  ocean,  up  and  down  from  beggar  to  prince,  from 
prince  to  beggar,  they  go,  telling  men  of  Jesus  and  sum- 
ming up  all  their  appeals  in  that  one  exhortation  which 
no  amount  of  cant  and  vulgar  ignorance  has  ever  yet  suc- 
ceeded in  robbing  of  its  fine  and  beautiful  attraction, 
*'  Come  to  Him,"  "  Come  to  Jesus." 

It  would  be  interesting  to  trace  the  history  of  the  teach- 
ing of  Christianity  and  see  how  it  pales  or  brightens  ac- 


44  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

cording  as  this  personal  character  of  it  all  is  obscure  or 
vivid.  That  I  must  not  undertake  to  do,  but  all  the  his- 
tory of  preaching  would  sustain  the  truth  of  the  essential- 
ness  of  this  personal  element  in  Christianity.  Indeed,  the 
peculiar  feeling  with  which  in  the  best  days  of  the  min- 
istry Christian  people  have  regarded  their  ministers,  so 
different  from  that  with  which  the  superstitious  savage 
honors  the  priest  he  fears,  or  that  with  which  the  scholar 
regards  the  teacher  to  whom  he  listens,  that  confidence 
blending  respect  and  love  which,  so  far  as  I  know,  is  unlike 
what  an}?-  other  disciple  has  for  a,ny  other  teacher  through 
the  world — this  seems  to  me  to  be  one  indication  of  the 
personalness  of  the  religion  which  the  minister  teaches. 
He  who  brings  me  a  truth  has  himself  something  of  the 
sacredness  of  the  truth  he  brings.  He  who  kindles  a  feel- 
ing must  always  have  something  of  the  brightness  or  the 
sadness  of  the  emotion  he  excites.  He  who  enforces  duty 
must  have  some  of  the  dignity  of  the  task  which  he  de- 
clares. But  he  who  makes  me  know  a  gracious  and  great 
Person  who  is  to  me  thenceforth  truth,  love,  and  law  to- 
gether, has  something  of  the  mystery  and  dearness  and 
infiniteness  of  the  Person  whom  he  has  made  me  know. 
And  this  has  made  the  singular  power  which  has  belonged, 
among  all  true  ministries  of  men  to  men,  to  the  ministry 
of  the  Incarnation  and  the  Cross.  I  am  sure,  if  we  could 
trace  it,  that  the  degree  of  the  best  feeling  of  various 
peoj^le  toward  various  ministers  would  correspond  very 
exactly  with  the  degi-ee  to  which  those  different  ministers 
realized  themselves,  and  made  real  to  their  people  the  first 
great  truth  of  Christianity,  that  Christianity  is  Christ. 

If  you  have  this  in  your  ministry,  my  friends,  your  min- 
istry must  be  strong,  whether  its  strength  be  of  a  sort  that 
men  will  recognize  and  j^raise  or  not.  Without  this,  it 
cannot  be  strong,  however  rigid  or  however  persuasive  it 
may  seem.     It  is  the  necessity  of  the  preacher's  work  that 


THE  TEACHING    OF  RELIGION.  45 

it  should  know  its  best  motive.     In  all  works  it  is  good,<i 
in  ours  it  is  essential.     A  man  will  dig  his  ditch  better  if  | 
he  knows  and  cares  for  the  great  plan  of  giving  the  thirsty 
city  water.     Still,  he  can  dig  his  ditch  for  his  dollar  a  day. 
But  a  man  cannot  really  preach  at  all  unless  he  knows 
why  he  preaches,  unless  he  is  in  some   degree  eager  to^ 
make  men  know  the  Christ  whom  he  knows. 

I  have  dwelt  long  on  this  general  first  ti-uth,  because  it 
is  essential  to  all  that  I  have  to  say.  Indeed,  I  am  not 
sure  but  it  is  all  that  I  have  to  say.  But  now  let  us  go 
back  again.  We  saw  the  different  views  which  different 
men  took  of  the  whole  work  of  teaching  religion.  One 
class  of  men  believed  that  it  was  impossible ;  another  class 
comprehended  it  all  in  the  teaching  of  doctrine )  another 
in  the  excitement  of  emotion ;  another  in  the  regulation 
of  life.  The  skeptic,  the  dogmatist,  the  revivalist,  and 
the  ecclesiastic  or  the  legalist — these  are  the  four.  And 
now  we  want  to  see  what  effect  it  will  have  upon  each  of 
them  if  what  we  have  seen  to  be  the  true  character  of 
Christian  teaching,  the  bringing  of  Christ  to  men  and  of 
men  to  Christ,  be  wholly  recognized. 

It  certainly  must  touch  the  skepticism  of  those  who, 
religious  themselves,  doubt  whether  it  is  possible  in  the 
nature  of  things  for  one  nuxn  to  really  teach  another  man 
religion.  That  doubt,  as  I  pointed  out,  comes  from  the 
strong  sense  of  individuality  in  the  way  in  which  the  be- 
liever holds  his  Christian  truth,  and  from  the  respectful 
regard  in  which  a  man  who  honors  his  own  individuality 
holds  also  the  individuality  of  others.  These  are  its  best 
motives.  I  think  it  is  impossible  for  any  man  to  be  ear- 
nest and  thoughtful  to-day  and  not  feel  their  force.  I 
think  there  can  be  no  more  interesting  condition,  no  con- 
dition in  some  ways  more  painfid  to  behold,  than  that  in 
which  manj'  very  true  and  noble  people  in  our  day  are 
standing.    They  are  believers.     Their  belief  is  everything 


46  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

to  tliem.  They  would  do  anything,  give  anything,  to  make 
their  brethren  share  their  belief.  But  the  very  earnest- 
ness of  their  belief  makes  them  feel  the  distinctiveness  of 
their  faith.  It  seems,  as  it  indeed  is  true,  that  no  other 
believer  ever  believed  just  as  they  do.  The  doctrines  are 
to  them  different  from  any  definitions  they  have  ever 
read ;  they  have  heard  from  no  other  penitent  of  a  repen- 
tance, from  no  other  forgiven  soul  of  a  rapture,  that  exactly 
matches  what  they  have  felt.  And  duty  is  to  them  some- 
thing peculiar,  and  their  own,  struck  out  from  the  contact 
of  their  own  character,  full  of  its  own  needs  and  tempta- 
tions, against  this,  their  own  world.  No  wonder  they  are 
puzzled.  How  can  they  teach  another?  How  can  they 
bid  them  believe  and  feel  and  act  as  they  do  when  they 
seem  to  believe  and  act  and  do  like  no  other  soul?  I 
think  that  these  are  questions  that  haunt  many  a  pulpit. 
I  think  that  in  them  there  must  lie  the  explanation  of 
what  puzzles  us  so  often,  the  sight  of  a  minister  of  deep, 
true,  characteristic  personal  religion  who  preaches  empty 
commonplaces.  He  does  not  expect  these  men  and  women 
to  be  just  the  Christians  that  he  is,  and  no  other  type  of 
Christianity  has  any  reality  to  him.  Must  it  not  save 
this  man  if  he  can  clearly,  strongly  comprehend  that  the 
essence  of  Christian  character  is  loyalty  to  a  personal 
Christ  ?  When  he  cainiot  bring  men  to  his  doctrine  and 
say,  "  Believe  just  that,"  nor  to  his  emotional  experience 
and  say,  "Feel  just  that,"  nor  to  his  way  of  living  and  say, 
"Live  just  so,"  he  can  still  bring  them  to  Christ  and 
Christ  to  them  and  say,  "  Love  Him,"  and  look  to  see  them 
know  Him,  feel  Him,  obey  Him  as  He  shall  lead  them. 
He  does  not  disown  or  dishonor  his  own  individuality, 
nor  does  he  invade  and  overpower  theirs  when  he  does 
that.  He  teaches  them  that  religion  which  he  knows  be- 
longs to  him  and  them  alike,  and  yet  he  satisfies  himself 
and  honors  them  by  more  than  readiness,  by  a  sincere 


THE   TEACHING    OF  BELIGIOX.  47 

desire  that  Christ  shall  make  it  theirs  for  them  as  He  has 
made  it  his  for  him. 

And  now  we  have  to  ask  how,  with  this  fundamental 
conception  of  Christianity  always  in  mind,  we  shall  deal 
with  the  three  ideas  of  those  who  do  believe  that  it  is 
possible  to  teach  religion.  Religion  as  doctrine,  as  feel- 
ing, and  as  law — those  were  the  three  ideas.  The  difficulty 
with  them,  as  we  saw,  lay  in  their  separation.  The  true, 
complete  religious  teaching,  that  which  you  and  I  as  min- 
isters are  arriving  at,  comprehends  them  all.  And  this 
unity  of  what  is  so  often  separated  is  secured  by  the 
presence  behind  them  all  of  that  which  is  greater  than 
either  of  them,  as  the  purpose  is  always  greater  than  the 
means,  the  personal  idea  of  Christianity.  When  doctrine, 
emotion,  and  conduct  cease  to  be  counted  as  valuable  for 
themselves  and  are  valued  as  the  avenues  through  which 
Christ,  the  personal  Christ,  may  come  to  the  soids  that 
He  is  seeldng  to  renew,  then  each  of  them  is  rightly 
understood  in  itself  and  comes  into  its  true  harmony  and 
union  with  the  others. 

In  what  is  left  of  this  lecture  I  want  to  speak  of  the 
teaching  of  doctrine  as  a  means  by  which  the  soul  of  man 
may  be  brought  to  know  Christ. 

I  have  before  defined  doctrine  as  truth  considered  with 
reference  to  its  being  taught,  and  the  taught  truth  about 
any  person  or  any  thing  is  like  a  glass  through  Avliich  that 
person  or  thing  is  to  be  seen.  Two  things  are  necessary : 
one  is  that  the  glass  should  be  clean  and  pure ;  the  other 
is  that  it  should  be  held  in  the  right  place  at  the  right 
angle,  squarely  between  the  man  who  is  to  see  and  the 
person  or  thing  Avhich  is  to  be  seen.  And  these  two  things 
are  necessary  about  doctrine — these  two  things  are  to  be 
studied  by  every  man  whose  business  it  is  to  teach  truth 
about  God :  one  is  that  the  truth  which  he  teaches  should 
be  purely,  simply  true;   the  other  is  that  it  should  be 


48  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

properly  presented,  held  squarely  between  the  eye  of 
the  man  and  God,  so  that  the  eye  of  man  shall  see  God 
through  the  truth  about  Him.  If  the  truth  be  held  aslant 
you  see  the  truth,  and  not  God  through  the  truth,  as,  if  a 
sheet  of  glass  is  held  not  squarely  between  you  and  a  pic- 
ture, you  see  the  glass,  and  not  the  picture  through  the 
glass. 

Among  the  teachers  of  truth  there  seem  to  me  to  be  two 
tendencies,  both  of  which,  so  far  as  they  are  indulged, 
interfere  with  this  primary  and  fundamental  purpose  for 
which  truth  is  taught  at  all.  There  are  two  classes  of 
preachers :  one,  of  those  who  disregard  the  first  of  the 
necessities,  the  cleanness  of  the  glass ;  the  other,  of  those 
who  forget  the  second  of  the  two  necessities,  the  right 
jiosition  of  the  glass.  There  are  both  kinds  to-day,  and  the 
young  preacher  finds  himself  sorely  juizzled  among  them. 
One  kind  of  preacher  simply  insists  that  the  statement  of 
truth  shall  be  seK-consistent,  that  it  shall  be  absolutely  a 
perfect  system  as  far  as  he  can  make  it.  The  other  is 
perpetually  trying  to  modify  and  pare  down  truth  to 
meet  men's  wants  as  shown  in  their  demands.  I  suppose 
that  in  all  times  there  have  been  these  two  kinds  of  teach- 
ers, and  that  always  the  question  of  how  far  truth  was 
to  be  adapted  to  men  in  its  selection  and  in  its  forms  of 
presentation  has  been  one  that  has  been  answered  in  part 
according  to  the  different  temperaments  of  different  men, 
and  that  has  given  continual  anxiety  to  anxious,  conscien- 
tious teachers. 

But  yet  some  answer  to  the  question  is  not  hard.  No 
most  earnest  and  affectionate  desire  to  make  Christ  dear 
to  men  can  justify  us  in  saying  anything  which  we  do  not 
hold  to  be  absolutely  and  purely  true  concerning  Him,  in 
changing,  or,  as  we  dare  to  say  sometimes,  "  softening " 
the  truth  about  Him.  The  best  safeguard  against  that 
tendency  is  the  profound  conviction,  wrought  out  and 


THE   TEACHING    OF  BELIGIOX.  49 

wroiig'lit  into  us  by  our  own  experience  of  Christ's  work 
for  our  souls,  that  Chi'ist  is  perfectly  what  the  human  soul 
needs,  that  if  He  only  reaches  it.  He  must  save  it  with 
complete  salvation.  The  more  thoroughly  I  honor  and 
love  a  picture  the  more  I  shall  be  above  any  temptation 
to  put  any  color  into  the  glass  which  I  hold  before  it ;  the 
more  I  shall  revolt  against  any  suggestion  that  I  may 
soften  or  brighten  its  colors  to  make  men  like  it  more.  I 
trust  the  thing  which  I  comi3letely  love.  The  only  real 
assurance  against  unreal,  fantastic,  sensational,  indulgent 
teaching  about  Christ  is  in  the  teacher's  own  complete 
conviction,  from  his  OAvn  experience,  of  the  perfection  and 
sufficiency  of  Christ,  just  as  Christ  is. 

No  doubt,  in  times  like  these,  when  men's  power  of 
believing  seems  to  be  weak  and  sickly,  many  a  preacher 
with  the  purest  motive  feels  a  desire  to  make  the  truth  he 
has  to  tell  and  ask  men  to  l)elieve  as  easy  as  he  can.  He 
thinks  he  must  not  quench  the  smoking  flax,  nor  break 
the  reed  that  is  already  sorely  bruised.  But,  not  to  sj)eak 
of  the  essential  restraint  which  there  must  always  be  on 
such  an  impulse,  that,  if  the  truth  we  utter  is  not  wholly 
true,  it  will  not  be  really  Christ  that  men  see  through  it, 
and  so  the  power  of  it  all  which  is  in  Christ  will  be  so  far 
lost,  there  is  another  conviction  which  grows  strong  as 
we  watch  preachers  and  congregations.  It  is  that  men 
are  not  won  by  making  belief  seem  easy,  nor  are  men 
alienated  by  the  hardness  of  belief,  provided  only  that  the 
hardness  seems  to  be  something  natui'ally  belonging  to 
the  truth,  and  not  something  gratuitously  added  to  it. 
Indeed,  the  natural  history  of  belief  would  seem  to  show 
that  men  at  large  are  fascinated  rather  than  repelled  by 
difftculty.  Credo  quia  hnpossibUe  is  the  expression  of  no 
rare  experience.  It  is  the  religion  of  most  demands  that 
have  most  ruled  the  world.  The  easy  faiths  have  been 
the  weak  faiths.     Men  like  to  feel  heroic  in  theii*  faith ; 


50  EsSSAYS  AND  ADDBESSES. 

and  always  it  has  been  easier  to  excite  fanaticism  than  to 
build  up  a  quiet,  reasonable  belief.  It  would  be  a  wretched 
falsehood,  and  one  which  would  no  doubt  defeat  itself  if 
a  preacher  tried  to  take  advantage  of  this  fact  of  human 
nature ;  but  it  may  at  least  come  in  to  help  us  to  resist  the 
disposition  to  omit  or  soften  truths  in  order  that  men 
may  receive  the  truth  more  easily.  The  hope  of  a  large 
general  belief  in  Christian  truth,  more  general  than  any 
that  any  past  age  has  witnessed,  does,  no  doubt,  involve 
a  more  reasonable  and  spiritual  presentation  of  it  than 
the  j)ast  has  seen,  but  it  will  never  be  attained  by  making 
truth  meager.  The  Christ  whom  tlie  world  shall  at  last 
believe  in  will  be  the  whole  Christ,  seen  through  all  the 
depth  of  all  His  truth. 

And  yet,  no  doubt,  there  is  something  real  and  pressing 
in  the  cry  which  we  hear  everywhere  for  the  curtailing  of 
doctrine.  It  is  very  ignorant  and  blind.  The  minister 
must  find  out  what  it  means  more  wisely  than  it  knows 
itself.  If  he  takes  it  at  its  word  and  tries  to  satisfy  it  by- 
making  doctrine  slight  and  easy,  he  will,  as  I  have  said, 
defeat  his  own  well-meant  but  foolish  effort.  It  seems  to 
me  that  what  he  reall}^  is  to  hear  in  it  underneath  the 
mistaken  expression  of  itself  which  it  makes  is  a  great 
general  desh*e  to  reach  the  more  spiritual  meaning  of 
truths  whose  presentation  has  grown  unspiritual.  Not 
easiness  nor  hardness  of  belief  is  what  men  really  want  in 
what  they  are  taught,  but  trufJi,  whether  it  be  hard  or 
easy.  Not  greater  ease  is  what  we  are  to  seek  in  order 
to  conciliate  more  belief,  but  more  spirituality,  which 
means  more  truth.  For  instance,  when  men  cry  out 
against  the  teaching  of  an  everlasting  hell  to  which  they 
\ia,ye  long  listened,  nothing  could  be  more  mistaken  than 
to  try  to  win  their  faith  by  a  mere  sweeping  aside  of  the 
whole  truth  of  retribution  ;  nothing  could  be  more  futile 
than  to  trv  to  make  them  believe  in  God  by  stripping  the 


THE   TEACHING    OF  JIELIGIOX.  51 

God  we  offer  tliem  of  His  divine  attributes  of  judgment 
and  discrimination.  But  if  there  comes,  as  there  must 
come,  out  of  the  tumult  a  deeper  sense  of  the  essential, 
the  eternal  connection  between  character  and  destiny ;  if 
men  looking  deeper  into  spiritual  life  are  taught  to  see 
that  the  wrath  of  God  and  the  love  of  God  are  not  con- 
tradictory but  the  inseparable  utterances  of  the  one  same 
nature ;  if  punishment  be  fastened  close  to  sin  as  the 
shadow  to  the  substance,  able  to  go,  certain  to  go,  where 
sin  can  go  and  noivhere  else — then  the  tumult  will  bring  a 
peace  of  deeper  and  completer  faith.  But  surely  it  will 
not  be  easier  for  a  man  to  believe  the  new  and  deep  than 
the  old  crude  doctrine.  It  will  lay  an  even  deeper  and 
more  awful  burden  on  his  conscience.  It  will  make  life 
more  and  not  less  solemn,  when  men  come  to  see  and  feel 
the  punishment  in  the  sin  than  when  they  listened  for  the 
threats  of  punishment  as  men  at  sea  listen  for  the  break- 
ers on  the  shore  while  they  are  sailing  in  smooth  waters, 
which  give  them  no  intimation  of  how  far  away  or  near 
the  breakers  are.  Men  really  serious,  men  in  a  condition 
where  they  are  capable  of  being  taught  religion,  do  not 
dread,  they  ivant  to  find  life  solemn.  They  wiU  turn  aside 
from  any  teaching  which  fritters  its  solemnity  away. 
Only  it  must  be  the  solemnity  of  a  present  God  who 
speaks  to  their  spiritual  understanding,  not  the  solemnity 
of  ghosts  who  haunt  and  scare  them  with  incoherent  cries, 
whose  threatening  they  do  not  see  how  to  escape,  and 
whose  beckoning  fingers  they  do  not  see  how  to  follow. 

I  turn  to  another  point  in  which  the  teaching  of  Chris- 
tianity as  doctrine  is  helped  by  the  clear  sight  and  con- 
stant recollection  of  our  first  principle,  that  the  object  of 
all  the  teaching  is  to  bring  Christ  to  men.  It  will  direct 
us  in  our  choice  of  the  truth  that  we  shall  teach.  It  will 
inspire  truth  with  timeliness.  For,  after  all,  all  divine 
truth  is  one.     What  we  call  different  truths  are  different 


52  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

aspects  of  the  truth.  They  are  the  different  ways  in 
which  we  hokl  the  glass  between  man  and  the  Christ 
whom  we  want  him  to  see.  Now  when  a  man  comes  to 
me  and  says,  "  Wliy  do  you  not  preach  this  truth  more?" 
and  I  reply  to  him,  "Why  should  I"?"  and  he  answers, 
"  Because  it  is  a  truth  which  many  men  are  denying  and 
many  other  men  are  forgetting,"  I  venture  to  think  that 
he  has  not  given  me  a  satisfactory  or  sufficient  reason.  It 
may  be  that  I  ought  to  preach  that  truth,  but  his  reason 
is  not  enough  to  make  me  think  I  ought.  It  may  very 
possibly  be  that  the  fact  to  which  he  points  me,  that  it  is 
a  truth  on  which  the  minds  of  men  are  careless  now,  may 
prove  that  it  is  not  the  truth  for  me  to  preach  just  now. 
It  may  be  true,  but  not  the  truth  which  men  are  needing 
now.  The  instinct  with  which  men  have  turned  away 
from  it  just  at  tlie  present  moment  may  be  a  healthy 
instinct ;  certainly  the  disposition  which  some  preachers 
have  always  shown  to  decide  what  truths  they  ought  most 
to  emphasize  by  seeing  what  truths  the  people  most  dis- 
liked to  hear  cannot  be  sensible  or  sound.  It  is  firing 
your  shot  where  the  ranks  of  the  eneni}^  are  thinnest. 
Nor  can  the  desire  to  preserve  the  symmetry  of  truth,  to 
rekindle  in  the  great  circle  of  doctrines  those  lights  which 
for  the  moment  are  burning  dim,  furnish  you  a  safe  and 
sufficient  rule.  That  desire  has  been  the  secret  of  the 
weakness  of  many  a  conscientious,  able,  and  wholly  in- 
effective ministry. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  quite  as  trae  under  our 
definition  of  what  it  is  to  teach  religion  that  the  mere 
desire  of  people  that  a  certain  truth  should  be  magnified 
cannot  be  taken  as  a  certain  indication  that  it  is  the  truth 
for  us  to  preach.  I  do  believe  that  it  is  a  better  indi- 
cation than  the  other.  I  would  rather  be  guided,  on  the 
whole,  by  what  the  people  want  to  hear  than  by  what  the 
people  hate  to  hear.     But  neither  is  a  worthy  guide  for  a. 


THE   TEACHING   OF  RELIGION.  53 

man  who  is  a  student  of  humanity  and  a  servant  of  Christ, 
bringing  the  two  together.  If  I  am  trying  to  bring  the 
seed  and  the  ground  together,  I  shall  be  sure  that  the  time 
to  sow  the  seed  must  be  when  the  ground  is  soft  and 
welcomes  it,  and  not  when  it  is  hard  and  refuses  it.  But 
I  shall  know  that  it  is  possible  for  the  ground  to  be  too 
soft  as  well  as  for  it  to  be  too  hard  for  the  seed's  best 
reception ;  and  so  the  people's  desire  for  the  preaching  of 
a  certain  truth  may  indicate  not  a  healthy  sense  of  need, 
but  a  morbid  craving.  They  may  want  to  hear  about  it 
just  because  it  is  antiquated  and  unpractical  and  does  not 
trouble  their  consciences,  and  can  be  treated  purely  as  a 
subject  of  curiosit}^  and  speculation.  Its  attraction  for 
them  may  be  like  the  unnatural  sweetness  of  an  apple 
which  has  been  frozen  and  is  no  longer  nutritious.  This 
applies  to  the  whole  question  of  the  minister's  relation  to 
those  strange  outbreaks  of  interest  in  some  special  doc- 
trine which  are  so  frequent  and  sometimes  seem  so  unac- 
countable. Such  outbreaks  are  not  so  unaccountable  as 
they  appear ;  if  they  are  not  factitious,  if  they  come  natu- 
rally, without  sensational  intention,  they  are  only  the 
breaking  out  of  a  fire  which  has  been  brewing  under  the 
crust  at  some  point  where  the  crust  is  thinnest.  But  it 
may  well  be  questioned  whether  the  moment  of  such  sud- 
den interest  in  some  great  truth  of  Christianity  is  the 
moment  when  the  preacher  can  best  preach  iipon  it. 
There  is  much,  I  know,  to  make  men  think  it  is.  That 
interest  which  it  is  often  so  hard  to  stir  is  stirred  already. 
Men  are  eager  to  listen.  Every  newspaper  stimulates 
their  interest.  Every  platform  speech  is  seasoned  with 
the  theological  controversy  of  the  hour.  Boys  sell  tracts 
and  sermons  along  with  the  journals  of  the  day.  Doc- 
trinal novelettes  shine  in  the  monthly  magazines,  and 
stately  symposia  sit  in  the  solemn  banquet-chambers  of 
the  quarterlies.     Of  the  preacher's  duty  in  connection 


54  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

with  such  times  there  are  two  things  to  say.  First;  this : 
he  must  decide  his  duty  by  the  great,  final  object  of  his 
ministry.  If  the  object  of  his  ministry  is  a  large  congre- 
gation, here  is  the  time,  here  is  the  way  to  get  it.  If  the 
object  of  his  ministry  is  to  impress  his  ideas  about  eternal 
punishment  or  any  other  topic  upon  the  people,  probably 
there  could  be  no  better  tune  than  this.  If  the  object  of 
his  ministry  is  to  show  God  to  men,  the  danger  is  that  an 
intense  interest  in  some  one  side,  the  magnitude  of  some 
one  Ijit  of  truth,  will  distort  the  medium  through  which 
he  shows  Him.  If  you  will  forgive  me  for  returning  once 
more  to  the  figure  which  I  used,  the  danger  is  lest  if  some 
one  component  of  the  glass  be  in  undue  proportion,  the 
glass  shall  be  muddy  and  show  its  own  muddiness  instead 
of  the  picture  that  it  is  trying  to  display.  And  the  second 
thing  is  this :  if  a  preacher  sees  it  right  to  take  advantage 
of  a  temporary  interest  in  some  religious  truth  and  make 
that  truth  his  topic,  he  is  bound  to  treat  it  always  with 
reference  to  the  great  piu-pose  of  his  preaching.  If  he 
preaches  about  everlasting  punishment,  he  is  bound  to 
let  men  see,  to  malie  men  see,  that  whether  the  wicked  are 
to  be  everlastingly  punislied  or  not,  at  least  the  gospel,  the 
good  news,  cannot  be  the  tidings  that  they  are,  and  that 
to  represent  the  Christian  faith  as  consisting  in  a  right 
belief  as  to  what  will  be  done  to  men  if  they  are  wicked, 
and  not  a  clear  sight  of  the  regenerating  grace  b}^  which 
the  vilest  sinner  may  become  good,  is  to  misrepresent  it 
and  dishonor  it. 

It  seems  to  me  as  if,  were  I  a  layman  in  the  days  when 
some  doctrine  had  got  loose  as  it  were  into  the  wind  and 
was  being  blown  across  the  common  and  up  and  down  the 
streets,  I  should  go  to  church  on  Sunday,  not  wanting 
my  minister  to  give  me  an  oracular  answer  to  all  the 
questions  which  had  been  started  about  it,  which  I  should 
not  beheve  if  he  did  give  it,  but  hoping  that  out  of  his 


THE   TEACHING    OF  liELIGIOX.  55 

sermon  I  might  refresh  my  knowledge  of  Christ,  get  Him, 
His  nature,  His  work,  and  His  desires  for  me  once  more 
clear  before  me,  and  go  out  more  ready  to  see  this  disputed 
truth  of  the  moment  in  His  light  and  as  an  utterance  of 
Him. 

I  do  not  plead  for  shirking.  Incidentally  it  may  be 
wise  to  declare  yourself  upon  the  question  of  the  hour 
just  in  order  that  yowY  people  may  know  that  you  are 
frank  and  have  nothing  to  conceal  from  them.  If  a 
preacher  holds  anything  to  be  true  and  knows  that  his 
people  think  he  is  unwilling  to  speak  his  mind  upon  that 
point,  he  had  better  preach  on  it  next  Sunday  morning. 
But  that  is  incidental ;  that  is  to  assure  their  confidence 
in  him  and  make  them  trust  his  honesty  whenever  he 
shall  speak  to  them.  But  whether  that  is  the  best  mo- 
ment to  show  them  Christ  through  that  especial  truth  is 
quite  another  question. 

And  here  comes  in  another  point,  our  duty  with  regard 
to  religious  controversy.  It  seems  to  me  that  controversy 
which  has  in  it  any  element  of  bitterness  or  personal  an- 
tagonism is  like  war,  a  necessary  evil  in  an  imperfect  state 
of  things,  whose  worst  harm  is  only  to  l^e  obviated  by  its 
being  continually  remembered  that  it  is  not  the  ideal 
method  of  religious  life  and  progress.  I  dare  not  wish 
that  all  the  great  controversial  voices  of  the  past  or  of 
the  present  could  be  silenced,  any  more  than  I  could  de- 
sire that  all  the  great  warriors  of  history  could  be  swept 
off  the  pedestals  where  the  admiration  of  mankind  has  set 
them.  I  may  feel  my  heart  beat  faster  at  the  challenge 
of  a  disputant  as  I  may  own  to  the  thrill  of  the  bugle  and 
the  enthusiasm  of  the  flag,  and  3'^et  all  the  while  I  may 
feel  sure  that  there  is  a  higher  way  for  the  soul  of  man 
to  reach  truth  than  by  fighting  over  it,  as  the  general 
himself  leading  his  army  into  battle  may  own  that  the 
perfect  condition  of  man  shall  be  peace,  not  war,  and  pray 


5G  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

for  peace  tlirough  the  smoke  and  tlmnder  of  the  war  that 
he  delights  in  now.  Controversy  is  a  means.  The  end  is 
greater  tlian  the  means.  The  end  is  always  claiming  for 
itself  purer  and  more  perfect  means.  Controversy  con- 
ducted with  real  reference  to  God  and  man,  with  a  real 
wish  to  jnake  God  more  real  to  man  and  man  more  near 
to  God,  may  be  legitimate,  ma}^  be  a  duty,  like  war  that  is 
truly  carried  on  for  the  advance  of  civilization.  But  the 
moment  that  controversy  is  waged  for  its  own  sake,  the 
moment  that  it  is  assorted  as  a  duty,  and  any  preacher  is 
reproached  because  he  loves  to  build  wp  truth  more  than 
to  beat  do^^Ti  error,  it  becomes  like  a  mere  war  of  spite  or 
conquest,  which  is  always  hideous.  But  there  are  condi- 
tions of  the  public  mind  when  a  man  has  to  set  his  face 
against  and  steadfastly  resist  the  summons  to  such  con- 
troversies. There  are  times  that  make  artificial  sins  and 
artificial  heresies,  lest  they  should  find  no  enemies  to  fight 
with.  It  is  bad  to  cry,  "  Peace,  peace  !  "  when  there  is  no 
peace.  It  is  just  as  bad,  in  some  ways  it  is  worse,  to  cry, 
"  War,  war !  "  when  there  is  no  war. 

In  general,  the  terrors  of  bad  doctrine  cannot  be  made 
the  safeguard  of  truth,  any  nioi-e  than  the  terrors  of  sin 
can  be  made  the  safeguard  of  righteousness.  Terror  has 
its  place  in  the  teaching  of  religion  as  in  the  government 
of  life,  but  it  is  always  preliminary,  alwaj^s  arousing  and 
awaking  only,  never  creative.  You  do  not  plant  a  field  by 
pulling  out  the  rocks.  You  only  make  it  fit  for  planting. 
You  do  not  make  a  man  believe  truth  by  making  him  dis- 
believe error.  That  is  where  the  danger  of  all  the  con- 
troversialists has  always  lain. 

There  remain  some  points  of  detail  in  the  preacher's 
work  of  which  I  wish  to  speak  in  connection  with  the 
relation  of  doctrine  to  the  fundamental  purpose  of  relig- 
ious teaching,  which  is  the  showing  of  Christ  to  men.  I 
must  aUude  to  them  very  briefly.     The  first  is  the  duty 


THE   TEACHING    OF  RELIGION.  Ot 

whicli  tlie  preacher  feels  to  take  advantage,  not  merely  of 
certain  conditions  of  the  public  mind,  but  also  of  certain 
conditions  of  individuals  to  impress  the  truth  he  has  to 
teach.  A  man  is  softened  by  sickness  or  bereavement ; 
some  shock  has  broken  down  his  confidence  in  life  and  in 
himself.  You  or  I  as  his  minister  go  to  help  him  if  we 
can.  It  is  a  God-given  opportunity.  But  everything 
depends  on  how  we  go,  on  how,  in  going,  we  conceive  of 
what  we  have  to  do ;  if  we  go  thinking  that  now  is  a  good 
time  to  make  this  crushed  and  frightened  man  accept  our 
doctrine,  our  visit  is  a  failure.  He  either  throws  us  off 
indignantly  or  wearily,  or  else  he  takes  our  doctrine  in 
some  narrow  form,  and  forever  after  holds  it  in  some 
special  way  in  which  he  happened  to  take  refuge  in  it  in 
his  exigency.  But  if  you  go  simply  desiring  to  get  Christ 
and  that  soid  together,  that  the  soul  may  rest  in  Christ, 
that  Christ  may  satisfy  the  soul,  then  your  doctrine,  not 
abstract  but  personal,  becomes  the  declaration  of  the 
facts  of  Christ.  Through  the  facts  he  lays  hold  of  the 
Person,  and  however  different  afterward  the  facts  may 
seem  to  him,  the  Person  he  will  hold  always  with  the 
intensity  of  gratitude.  Many  a  man's  religious  life  has 
suffered,  as  many  another's  has  been  blessed,  hy  the  fact 
that  he  became  religious  in  some  critical,  exigent,  excep- 
tional hour  of  his  life.  Such  hours  are  not  good  for  learn- 
ing doctrine,  but  they  are  good  for  laying  hold  on  Christ. 
And  according  to  whether  the  religion  of  a  man  converted 
in  such  an  hour  was  of  the  first  or  second  sort  will  be  the 
harm  or  blessing. 

The  same  is  true  of  the  preacher's  attempt  to  suit  his 
teaching  to  different  classes  in  his  congregation,  to  old 
and  yoimg,  to  men  and  women,  to  the  ignorant  and 
learned.  Christ's  doctrine  is  the  same  for  all.  Christ 
Himself  touches  each  with  its  own  needed  help.  He 
whose  idea  of  Christianity  stops  short  in  doctrine  will 


58  i:SSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

wealdy  preach  one  truth  to  one  class  and  another  to  an- 
other in  his  desii'e  to  suit  them  all.  He  who,  behind  and 
through  doctrine,  always  feels  Christ  will  tell  the  self- 
same truth  forever,  and  trust  the  endlessly  adapted  love  of 
the  Saviour  to  make  it  to  each  soul  what  that  soul  needs. 

I  find,  too,  in  this  principle  the  key  to  that  much  dis- 
cussed institution,  the  Sunday-school.  It  is  easy  to  praise 
our  Sunday-schools,  and  easy  to  blame  them.  Just  now 
I  think  the  blame  inclines  to  outrun  the  praise,  and  no 
doubt  they  have  faults  enough.  But  fii-st  of  all,  we  must 
have  some  clear  standard  to  judge  them  by,  and  that  can 
come  only  from  a  clear  idea  about  the  nature  of  religious 
teaching.  If  to  teach  religion  is  primarily  and  funda- 
mentally to  impart  knowledge,  the  schools  are  failures. 
With  their  limited  time,  their  changing  administration, 
their  voluntary  attendance,  they  must  be  failures.  But 
if  the  teaching  of  religion  is  the  bringing  of  Christ  to 
men,  then  I  can  see  great  cause  for  hope,  congratulation, 
and  gratitude  in  what  the  Sunday-schools  are  doing, 
where  men  and  women  to  whom  Christ  is  dear  are  in 
their  different  ways  making  Him  known  to  hosts  of  boj'S 
and  girls.  I  can  be  sure  that  there  is  very  much  crude 
and  wrong  teaching,  and  yet  be  thankful  for  the  simple- 
hearted  and  gracious  work. 

I  think,  then,  in  a  clear,  strong  hold  of  our  truth  there 
lies  the  only  hope  for  a  minister's  linmility,  which  is  the 
crown  and  jewel  of  his  ministry.  It  is  a  great  deal  easier 
to  grow  proud  of  the  thoroughness  and  faithfulness  with 
which  you  hold  a  doctrine  than  of  the  completeness  with 
which  you  understand  Christ.  The  doctrine  you  may 
squeeze  so  small  that  you  can  hold  it  all  in  j'our  hand  and 
feel  that  you  have  comprehended  it.  The  divine  Saviour, 
we  know,  however  we  may  talk  competently  of  Him,  is 
past  our  comjn'ehension,  wiser,  dearer,  truer  than  we  have 
begun  to  know.  Your  pride  in  doctrine  requires  a  doctor 
wiser  and  more  orthodox  than  vou  to  shake  it.     Your 


THE   TEACHING    OF  RELIGION.  59 

pride  in  Christ  any  poor  saint  nearer  to  Him  than  you 
have  ever  di-eamed  of  being,  or  some  wretched  beggar 
bringing"  Him  in  some  new  shape  of  appealing  misery  to 
your  weak  love,  may  overturn  in  a  moment.  ''  The  man 
is  thrice  welcome  to  whom  my  Lord  has  reprimanded  me," 
said  Mohammed  one  day  most  nobly,  but  he  said  it  not  of 
a  theologian  who  had  beaten  him  in  argument,  but  of 
a  blind  "v\Teteh  whose  supplication  he  had  rejected,  and 
thereby  learned  how  far  he  still  was  from  God,  If  you 
want  to  protect  your  religious  pride,  make  your  religion 
consist  in  knowing  truth.  If  you  want  to  be  humble  in 
your  religion,  make  your  rehgion  begin  and  end  in  know- 
ing Christ. 

The  sister- jewel  of  humility  is  sincerity.  Insincerity 
comes  either  from  falsehood  or  from  fear.  It  is  either 
because  I  want  men  to  believe  something  wliich  I  do  not 
believe,  or  because  I  do  not  really  trust  the  strength  of 
what  I  beUeve,  that  I  am  insincere.  The  fii'st  is  the 
ground  of  all  insincerity  in  the  matter  of  teaching.  The 
second  is  the  ground  of  aU  insincerity  in  the  manner  of 
teaching.  There  is  enough  of  both.  The  minister  whose 
own  soul  is  doubtful,  preaching  some  doctrine  which  he 
does  not  believe,  and  the  minister  who  beUeves,  but  will 
not  let  his  truth  rest  for  his  people  on  the  grounds  on 
which  it  rests  with  him,  but  bolsters  it  with  arguments 
and  sanctions  Avhich  he  does  not  think  are  true  and  sound, 
both  of  these  ministers  are  insincere.  I  know  that  such 
insincere  ministers  are  rare,  I  lielieve,  in  the  freedom  of 
Christian  teaching  which  prevails  to-da}^,  they  are  rarer 
to-day  than  they  have  ever  been ;  I  believe  they  are  rarer 
in  Christian  pulpits  than  in  the  preaching-places  of  any 
other  faith,  mainly  because  Christianity  is  an  essentially 
personal  religion  ;  mainly  because  Christian  truth  has  not 
to  be  guarded,  like  a  woven  cloth,  by  a  selvage  of  preju- 
dice that  it  may  not  ravel  out,  but  is  kept  complete  like 
a  live  tree  by  the  living  principle  which  gives  it  life  and 


60  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

value.  Oil,  beware  of  being  insincere,  but  be  sure  that  the 
natural  and  true  salvation  from  insincerity  is  in  preacMng 
Christ!  That  old  phrase,  which  has  been  so  often  the 
very  watchword  of  cant — how  it  still  declares  the  true 
nature  of  Christian  teaching!  Not  Christianity,  but 
Christ !  Not  a  doctrine,  but  a  Person  !  Christianity  only 
for  Christ !  The  doctrine  only  for  the  Person  !  Preach 
not  Christianity  but  Christ,  and  so  be  saved  from  sacri- 
ficing the  spiritual  necessity  of  truthfulness  to  the  seem- 
ing needs  of  what  you  call  the  truth — for  in  making  that 
sacrifice  good  men  grow  almost  conscientiously  insincere. 

I  add  but  one  word  more :  the  burden  that  weighs  down 
many  a  man's  ministry  is  the  sense  of  triteness  and  com- 
monplaceness.  Oh,  the  wretchedness  of  feeling  how  often 
this  has  been  said  which  I  am  going  to  say  next  Sunday ! 
Oh,  the  struggles  and  contortions  to  shake  off  that  misery 
and  say  something  new  and  be  original !  But  that  is 
all  as  if  the  glass  reproached  itself  with  colorlessness  and 
ti'ied  to  stain  itself  with  red  and  green  that  men  might 
look  at  it.  No ;  the  white  glass  is  saved  from  common- 
placeness  by  the  glory  of  the  picture  that  looks  through 
it.  And  the  redemption  of  our  sermons  as  of  our  charac- 
ters from  insignificance  into  dignity  and  worth  must 
come  not  from  fantastic  novelties  which  they  invent  for 
themselves,  but  from  their  bearing  simple  and  glorious 
witness  to  their  Lord.  Do  not  fear  triteness.  Only  really 
hold  your  own  new  life  honestly  up  to  Christ  in  thought- 
ful and  loving  consecration,  and  men  will  see  through  you 
something  of  that  Master  and  Saviour  who  is  forever  new. 

The  preacher's  work  is  the  best  work  in  tlie  world.  Let 
us  believe  that  fully,  but  let  the  lives  of  all  the  preachers 
teach  us  that  its  glory  is  not  in  it,  but  in  the  Christ  whom 
it  is  its  privilege  to  declare.  There  is  no  studj^  of  the 
famous  and  successful  preachers  which  does  not  bear 
testimony  to  that  truth. 


THE  PULPIT  AND  POPULAR  SKEPTICISM. 

{Princeton  Heview,  March,  1879.) 

The  characteristic  skepticism  of  to-day,  whetlier  it  be 
that  of  the  untaught  people  or  of  the  learned  scholar,  is 
marked  by  its  completeness  and  despair.  It  does  not 
suggest  any  substitute  for  the  religion  which  it  disbe- 
lieves, and  which  in  its  active  moods  it  labors  to  destroy. 
It  rejects  not  certain  doctrines  only,  but  the  whole  body 
of  the  Christian  faith.  This  fact,  it  seems  to  me,  must  be 
constantly  present  in  the  mind  of  any  one  who  attempts 
to  write  an  essay  upon  such  a  subject  as  I  have  chosen, 
and  must  furnish  the  key-note  for  all  his  treatment  of  it. 
He  must  be  sure  that  the  difficulty  of  which  he  has  to 
write  is  very  deep  and  very  broad ;  that  what  he  has  to 
do  is  not  merel}^  to  suggest  the  way  in  which  one  or  two 
weak  points  in  the  Christian  argument  may  be  fortified,  but 
to  show  in  what  stronger  and  more  convincing  attitude 
Christianity  itself  must  set  itself  before  the  eyes  of  men. 
At  the  same  time,  in  the  fact  which  I  have  mentioned 
really  lies  the  hope  of  the  Christian  teacher.  The  skepti- 
cism with  which  he  has  to  deal  goes  so  deep  that  it  has 
a  perpetual  tendency  to  defeat  itself.  Offering  men  no 
substitute  for  the  religion  which  it  woidd  destro}^,  it  leaves 
man's  religious  nature  unprovided  for  and  hungiy,  and 
therefore  gives  to  Christianity  the  perpetual  advantage  of 
human  nature,  if  it  can  only  be  large  enough  to  see  its 
chance. 

The  first  of  all  things,  then,  that  we  ought  to  say,  is 

61 


62  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDEESSES. 

tliis :  that  tliere  are  no  skilful  tricks,  no  special  methods 
of  shaping  arguments  or  stating  truths,  of  trapping  skep- 
tics in  their  own  toils,  or  of  puzzhng  back  again  with 
orthodox  speciousness  the  minds  that  have  "been  ah-eady 
puzzled  away  with  the  speciousness  of  science — there  are 
no  such  methods  which  can  be  taught  and  learned.  The 
only  way  in  which  any  man  must  hope  to  deal  with 
skepticism  must  be  by  the  strong  and  intelligent  building 
up  of  faith,  and  the  sooner  that  any  minister  can  be  con- 
vinced that  to  meet  unbelief  is  not  a  special  department 
of  his  pulpit  work,  to  be  undertaken  with  distinct  prep- 
aration and  with  special  effort,  apart  from  his  general 
work  of  preaching  the  gospel,  the  better  for  him  and  for 
his  work  and  for  his  people. 

As  we  approach  our  subject,  I  think  these  cpiestious 
must  suggest  themselves :  1.  What  are  the  characteristics 
of  the  popular  skepticism?  2.  What  do  these  character- 
istics require  in  the  man  who  has  to  deal  with  it!  and 
3.  How  can  the  right  man  do  his  work  for  faith  ?  The 
resistance,  the  workman,  and  the  method — the  enemy,  the 
soldier,  and  the  plan  of  fight.  Let  me  take  these  three  in 
this  order,  at  the  same  tune  not  trying  to  be  too  orderly. 

1.  And  first,  with  regard  to  the  resistance  or  the  enemy, 
I  have  ah-eady  intimated  this,  that  popular  skepticism  is 
-a  very  multifarious  and  wholesale  thing.  It  is  something 
utterly  different  from  what  it  used  to  be.  Once  he  who 
lived  out  in  the  thick  of  human  life  found  that  the  Chris- 
tianity of  the  Bible  was  much  disputed.  One  man  or  one 
set  of  men  did  not  believe  that  this  doctrine  which  the 
Church  held  was  taught  in  the  sacred  pages.  Another 
man  or  set  of  men  did  not  believe  that  such  or  such  a 
doctrine  could  be  held,  because  it  was  inconsistent  with 
human  reason  or  abhorrent  to  human  feeUng.  Another 
man  or  set  of  men  doubted  all  authority  of  the  Christian 
revelation.     On  each  of  these  questions  a  distinct  battle 


THE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  63 

could  be  joined.  On  one  side  or  the  other  arguments 
could  be  marshaled.  Each  man  could  be  called  upon  to 
say  what  he  doubted  and  why  he  doubted  it.  The  dis- 
proved scruple  meant  a  liberated  and  reestablished  faith. 
Of  course  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  that  state  of  things 
has  passed  away.  It  never  can  pass  away.  Always  there 
will  be  men  whose  doubts  are  definite  and  well  defined. 
But  any  man  who  has  seen  much  of  unbelief  as  it  exists 
among  our  people  now,  knows  that  in  general  it  does  not 
consist  of  any  such  precise  and  assignable  difficulties.  It 
is  not  the  difficulty  of  this  or  that  doctrine  that  makes  ^' 
men  skeptics  to-day.  It  is  rather  the  play  of  all  life  upon 
the  fundamental  grounds  and  general  structure  of  faith. 
It  is  the  meeting  in  the  commonest  minds  of  great  per- 
petual tides  of  thought  and  instinct  which  neutrahze  each 
other,  such  as  the  tides  of  faith  and  providence,  the  tides 
of  pessimism  and  optimism,  the  tides  of  self-sacrifice  and 
selfishness. 

Let  this  not  seem  too  large  or  lofty  an  explanation  of 
the  commonplace  phenomena  of  doubt,  which  are  thick 
around  us  in  our  congregations,  and  thicker  still  outside 
our  congregations  in  the  world.  The  reason  why  my 
hearer,  who  sits  moodily  or  scornfully  or  sadly  before  me 
in  his  pew,  and  does  not  cordially  believe  a  word  of  what 
I  preach  to  him,  the  reason  why  he  disbelieves  is  not  that 
he  has  found  the  evidence  for  inspiration  or  for  Christ's 
divinity  or  for  the  atonement  unsatisfactory.  It  is  that 
the  aspect  of  the  world,  which  is  ftite,  has  been  too  strong!^ 
for  the  fundamental  religion  of  the  world,  which  is  provi- 
dence. And  the  temptation  of  the  world,  which  is  self- 
indulgence,  has  seemed  to  make  impossible  the  precept  of 
religion,  which  is  self-suiTcnder ;  and  the  tendency  of  ex- 
perience, which  is  hopelessness,  has  made  the  tendency  of 
the  gospel,  which  is  hope,  to  seem  unreal  and  unbelieva- 
ble.    No  man  can  do  anything  with  the  skepticism  of  this 


64  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

time  who  tliiuks  that  it  consists  in  the  disbelief  of  certain 
doctrines  wliich  need  to  be  reproved,  who  does  not  see 
that  its  heart  and  essence  is  in  the  conflict  of  life  with 
faith,  in  which  the  victory  can  be  secnred  to  faith  only 
l\y  clothing'  and  filling  her  with  new  and  more  personal 
vitality.  The  whole  representation  of  the  world  as  a 
battle-field,  in  which  religion  stands  np  on  one  side  and 
irreligion  on  the  other,  two  distinct  armies  ready  for  a 
fight,  each  loyal  to  its  captain,  fails  when  wc  attempt  its 
application  to  the  condition  of  things  to-day.  The  world 
is  like  a  ship  at  sea.  Belief  and  nnbelief  are  both  within 
her,  as  strength  and  weakness  are  together  in  every  bit 
of  wood  or  iron  that  makes  up  the  strongest  vessel.  It  is 
a  contest  with  herself,  a  contest  of  the  strength  of  each 
soul  with  its  own  feebleness.  Every  donbt  of  special  doc- 
trine is  but  the  creaking  or  cracking  of  some  straining 
plank. 

I  will  not  dwell  on  this,  although  it  would  be  interest- 
ing to  analyze  and  illustrate  it  at  length.  But  its  mere 
statement  is  enough  to  lead  us  on  to  what  it  is  the  main 
business  of  my  essay  to  assert,  that  popular  skepticism 
being  what  it  is,  the  main  method  of  meeting  it  must  be 
not  an  argument  but  a  man ;  that  the  minister,  in  other 
words,  who  deals  with  unbelief  most  successfully  to-day 
will  be  not  he  who  is  most  skilful  in  proving  truths  or 
disproving  errors,  but  he  Avho  is  most  powerful  in  strength- 
ening faith  in  people's  lives  by  the  way  in  which  the  power 
of  faith  is  uttered  through  his  own  character. 

Surely  this  follows  from  the  description  of  our  present 
unbelief  which  we  have  given.  If  unbelief  comes  not  by 
the  processes  of  logic,  but  by  the  power  of  life,  then  it  is 
through  change  of  life  that  the  relief  from  unbelief  must 
come,  and  change  of  life  comes  by  the  power  of  truth,  not 
abstract,  but  in  and  through  character.  I  do  not  depre- 
ciate the  other  forms  of  truth.     I  do  not  dishonor  truth 


TRE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  65 

presented  in  careful  statement  and  sustained  by  skilful 
argument.  I  do  not  say,  I  surely  do  not  think,  that  it  is 
by  any  mere  cheap  personal  magnetism  that  men  are  to 
be  charmed  out  of  doubting  into  believing.  Nothing  but 
the  eternal  truth  of  God  can  ever  meet  the  ever-shifting 
yet  ever  identical  error  and  unbeUef  of  man.  But  when 
I  am  asked,  "What  is  the  method  in  which  the  minister 
may  best  deal  with  unbelief  ? "  I  cannot  hesitate  for  a  mo- 
ment to  answer  that  the  method  which  includes  all  other 
methods  must  be  in  his  own  manhood,  in  his  character,  in 
his  being  such  a  man,  and  so  apprehending  truth  himself, 
that  truth  through  him  can  come  to  other  men.  Every 
other  conception  of  the  work  of  the  ministry  is  hopeless, 
except  that  which  never  loses  sight  for  a  moment  of  the 
fact  that  it  is  God's  ministry ;  that  these  are  God's  souls ; 
that  He  is  convincing  sin,  encouraging  and  helping  good- 
ness, and  ''  dealing  with  popular  skej^ticism " ;  that  we 
preachers  have  to  do  those  things  only  as  the  ax  has  to 
cat  dowji  the  tree,  or  the  brush  has  to  paint  the  pictm-e, 
only  by  being  as  true  a  servant  as  possible  to  the  wood- 
man or  the  artist. 

This  opens  the  way  to  more  special  suggestions  about 
what  kind  of  man  he  will  be  who  will  most  effectively 
deal  with  popular  skepticism  from  the  pulpit,  which  is  the 
statement  of  our  subject  that  perhaps  would  have  been 
wisest. 

And,  fii'st  of  all,  as  the  most  needed,  and,  I  am  tempted 
to  say,  as  the  most  rare  of  the  quahties  that  such  a  man 
must  have,  I  cannot  hesitate  to  speak  of  candor.  The 
skepticism  which  I  have  been  trying  to  describe  evidently 
must  be  a  very  pervading  thing.  It  evidently  cannot  be 
shut  up  in  any  guarded  class  or  classes.  Life  plays  upon 
faith  everywhere.  Ideas  change  and  develop  in  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men.  And  the  occupants  of  pulpits, 
the  preachers,  have  their  doubts  and  disbeliefs  as  well  as 


66  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

others.  The  fii-st  step,  I  believe,  toward  a  clear  relation- 
ship between  the  preacher  and  the  people  ought  to  be  a 
perfectly  frank  nnderstanding  of  this  fact.  There  onght 
to  be  not  the  least  conceahnent  or  disguise  about  it.  Men 
ought  never  to  have  the  slightest  reason  to  suppose  that 
the  preacher  is  asking  them  to  believe  what  he  does  not 
believe  himself,  or  warning  them  that  it  is  dangerous 
to  doubt  what  to  his  own  mind  seems  very  questionable. 
But  how  is  it  now  ?  A  large  acquaintance  with  clerical 
life  has  led  me  to  think  that  almost  any  company  of 
clergymen  gathering  together  and  talking  freely  to  one 
another  will  express  opinions  which  would  greatly  surprise 
and  at  the  same  greatly  relieve  the  congregations  who 
ordinarily  listen  to  those  ministers.  Now  just  see  what 
that  means.  It  means  that  in  these  days,  when  faith  is 
hard,  we  are  deliberately  making  it  harder,  and  are  mak- 
ing ourselves  liable  to  the  Master's  terrible  rebuke  of  the 
Scribes  and  Pharisees  of  old  :  "  Thej^  bind  hea\y  burdens, 
and  grievous  to  be  borne,  and  lay  them  on  men's  shoul- 
ders, but  they  themselves  will  not  move  them  with  one  of 
their  fingers."  Is  not  this  true  ?  How  many  men  in  the 
ministry  to-day  believe  in  the  doctrine  of  verbal  inspira- 
tion which  oiu"  fathers  held,  and  how  many  of  us  have 
frankly  told  the  people  that  we  do  not  believe  it,  and  so 
lifted  off  their  Bible's  page  the  heavy  cloud  of  difficulties 
and  inconsistencies  which  that  doctrine  laid  there  ?  How 
many  of  us  hold  that  the  everlasting  punishment  of  the 
wicked  is  a  clear  and  certain  truth  of  revelation?  But 
how  many  of  us  who  do  not  hold  that  have  ever  said  a 
word  to  tell  men  that  we  thought  they  might  be  Christians 
and  yet  keep  a  hope  for  the  souls  of  all  God's  children  ? 
Remember,  I  am  not  speaking  now  of  whether  these  ideas 
are  true  or  not.  I  am  speaking  of  whether  we  think  that 
they  are  true,  and  of  what  our  duty  is  with  reference  to 
our  belief.     Not  much  more  than  a  vear  ago  I  heard  one 


THE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  67 

of  our  most  venerable  preachers  deliberately  tell  a  congre- 
gation that  no  man  was  a  Chi'istian  who  did  not  believe 
that  this  world  was  made  in  six  literal  days.  He  had  a 
perfect  right  to  say  so  if  he  thought  so,  as  no  doubt  he 
did.  But  for  those  of  us  whom  any  such  test  of  Chris- 
tianity would  totally  exclude  from  any  claim  to  Christian 
character,  to  let  such  statements  pass  without  most  clear 
and  earnest  disavowals  is  certainly  a  grievous  wrong  to 
faith,  and  makes  the  skepticism  against  wliich  it  tries  to 
guard. 

There  must  be  no  lines  of  orthodoxy  inside  the  lines  of 
truth.  Men  find  that  3^ou  are  playing  with  them,  and  will 
not  believe  you  even  when  you  come  in  earnest.  I  know 
what  may  be  said  in  answer.  I  know  the  old  talk  about 
holding  the  outworks  as  long  as  we  can,  and  then  retreat- 
ing to  the  citadel,  and  perhaps  there  has  hardly  been  a 
more  mischievous  metaphor  than  this.  It  is  the  mere 
illusion  of  a  metaphor.  The  minister  who  tries  to  make 
people  believe  that  which  he  questions,  in  order  to  keep 
them  from  questioning  that  which  he  believes,  knows  very 
little  about  the  certain  workings  of  the  human  heart  and 
has  no  real  faith  in  truth  itself. 

I  think  that  a  great  many  teachers  and  parents  now  are 
just  in  this  condition.  They  remember  that  they  started 
with  a  great  deal  more  belief  than  they  have  now.  Thej^ 
have  lost  much,  and  still  have  much  to  live  by.  They 
think  that  their  cliildren,  too,  must  start  believing  so 
much  that  they  can  afford  to  lose  a  gi'eat  deal  and  still 
have  something  left,  and  so  they  teach  these  children  what 
they  have  themselves  long  ceased  to  believe.  It  is  a  most 
dangerous  experiment. 

I  cannot  help  pausing  here  one  moment  to  express  the 
hope  that  our  theological  seminaries  are  dealing  fairly 
with  our  coming  ministers  in  this  respect ;  that  they  are 
teaching  them  from  the  first  that  their  business  is  to  find 


68  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

out  what  is  true  and  declare  it  to  the  world  in  its  com- 
pleteness, and  are  not  sending  them  out  hampered  and 
haunted  with  the  idea  that  they  are  to  proclaim  notliing 
which  is  not  safe.  The  lack  of  frankness  in  his  seminary 
teachers  has  cost  many  a  poor  minister  years  of  useless- 
ness,  and  at  last  a  dreadful  and  unnatural  struggle  into 
the  light  and  freedom  which  ought  to  have  been  his  at 
fii'st,  won  bountifully  in  these  nurseries  of  clerical  life. 

And  closely  tied  up  with  this  need  of  candor  is  the 
other  need  of  escape  from  partisanship  and  from  the 
reproach  of  partisanship.  One  of  the  reasons  why  the 
great  mass  of  intelligent  belief  wliich  our  ministers  pre- 
sent is  not  even  more  powerful  than  it  is  against  the  un- 
belief aromid  us,  lies,  of  course,  in  the  idea  that  all  these 
ministers  are  committed  to  believing;  that,  no  matter 
what  they  once  were,  now  they  are  no  longer  seekers  for 
truth,  but  advocates  for  some  accepted  and  defined  opin- 
ions. That  is  in  part  inevitable.  Every  man  loses  as 
well  as  gains  something  of  convincing  power  when  he 
declares  himself  openly  a  believer  in  any  truth.  But  so 
far  as  this  reproach  of  partisanship  finds  any  warrant 
in  the  way  in  which  a  preacher  defends  his  faith,  in  the 
questionable  arguments  which  he  uses  for  what  he  thinks 
unquestionable  truth,  in  the  way  in  which  he  makes  his 
ministry  seem  rather  a  scramlile  for  adherents  than  a 
Christ-like  love  for  souls,  or  the  way  in  which  an  unnatural 
unanimity  among  clergymen  seems  to  denote  a  profes- 
sional mind  that  would  leave  no  place  for  the  individual 
conscience  and  judgment  to  do  their  work — wherever 
partisanship  thus  proclaims  itself  it  palsies  instantly  and 
completely  the  power  of  the  jjreacher's  faith  to  utter  any 
real  message  or  do  any  real  good  to  unbelief. 

And  here  we  meet  another  question,  which  must  come 
to  every  minister  in  daj's  like  these.  I  may  have  seemed 
in  what  I  have  been  saying  to  fall  in  with  a  prevalent 


THE  PULPIT  AND  POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  09 

demand  which  asks  that  when  it  is  so  hard  for  men  to 
believe  they  should  be  asked  to  believe  just  as  Httle  as 
possible  ;  that  all  the  most  exacting  articles  of  faith  should 
be  cast  away,  and  only  those  which  any  weakest  faith  Ciui 
master  should  be  left  for  faith  to  struggle  with  while  faith 
is  so  weak.  I  hold  no  such  foolish,  base  idea  as  that.  I 
do  not  believe  in  tearing  off  and  throwing  away  half  the 
ship  when  the  storm  is  coming  up.  Then  is  the  time  for 
the  ship  to  gather  in,  indeed,  all  her  loose  canvas,  to  make 
herself  as  sniig  and  tight  as  possible,  to  carry  nothing 
besides  herself,  but  to  be  sure  that  she  has  all  herself  and 
is  complete.  And  so  it  is  with  faith  in  doubting  days. 
There  is  no  greater  mistake,  I  think,  than  to  suppose  that 
in  such  days  men  want  to  have  Christian  truth  made 
slight  and  easy  to  them.  The  fact  of  Christian  history 
has  been  that  in  times  of  staggering  faith  men  need  the 
whole  truth,  not  modified  or  tamed  to  suit  their  weakened 
power  of  apprehension.  It  would  be  no  strange  issue  of 
such  times  as  we  are  living  in  if  out  of  them  should  come 
a  great  demand  for  difficult  doctrine,  a  time  of  supersti- 
tion, a  fever  to  succeed  the  chill ;  for  the  spiiit  that  cries 
"  Credo  quia  inipossihile"  the  heroic  sjiirit  of  faith,  is  too 
deep  in  our  human  nature  for  any  one  century  to  have 
eradicated  it.  That  we  may  guard  against  such  reaction 
into  superstition,  as  well  as  meet  the  present  infidelity, 
what  we  need  is  not  more  easiness  but  more  simplicity  in 
the  doctrine  which  we  preach,  and  in  our  way  of  preaching 
it.  In  other  words,  it  is  not  a  smaller  amount  of  doctrine, 
but  it  is  a  larger  unity  of  doctrine.  It  is  a  more  profound 
entrance  into  the  heart  of  doctrine,  in  which  its  unity  and 
simplicity  reside,  a  more  true  grasp  and  enforcement  of 
its  spiritual  meaning.  What  I  mean  can  lie  made  most 
clear  by  an  instance  in  illustration.  And  there  is  none 
better  for  our  purpose  than  that  which  is  continually 
thrusting  itself  upon  us  now  in  the  discussion  of  the 


70  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

duration  of  future  punishment.  I  think  the  condition  of 
that  question  is  one  of  the  strangest  of  the  phenomena  of 
thought  that  ever  have  been  seen.  These  two  features  in 
it  impress  us :  first,  it  is  being  gravely  and  earnestly 
asserted  that  the  principal  question,  at  any  rate  a  vital 
question,  concerning  the  religion  which  teaches  man  that 
as  the  son  of  God  it  is  his  privilege  and  duty  to  love  and 
obey  his  Father,  is.  What  will  become  of  him  if  he  refuses 
to  obey  and  love  ?  and  secondly,  a  multitude  of  men  are 
found  discussing  whether  punishment  is  to  be  temporary 
or  eternal,  who  do  not  in  their  hearts  believe  that  there  is 
going  to  be  any  punishment  at  all.  And  this  state  of 
things  must  have  come  from  the  loss  or  obscuration  of 
the  central  truth,  about  which  the  whole  problem  of  man's 
destiny  must  take  its  shape,  which  is  the  malignant  and 
persistent  character  of  human  sin.  Not  as  a  question  of 
what  a  few  texts  mean,  not  as  a  curious  search  after  ai'bi- 
trary  enactments,  but  as  a  deep  study  into  the  inevitable 
necessities  of  spiritual  life,  with  a  profound  conviction 
that  whatever  comes  to  any  man  in  the  other  life  will 
come  because  it  must  come,  because  nothing  else  could 
come  to  such  a  man  as  he  is,  so  ought  the  truth  of  future 
punishment  to  be  investigated  and  enforced.  And  if  one 
asked  me  how  I  thought  the  popular  skepticism  upon  this 
subject  ought  to  be  dealt  with,  I  would  say  unhesitatingly, 
by  ceasing  to  preach  about  it  and  argue  about  it  alto- 
gether, and,  through  the  power  of  the  personal  Christ 
brought  to  the  lives  of  men,  awakening  such  a  dread  of 
sin  and  such  a  desire  of  holiness  as  should  make  those 
great  powers  awfid  and  beautiful  in  themselves,  and  not 
merely  in  their  consequences,  whether  those  consequences 
may  be  long  or  short.  For  after  all  the  preaching  of 
rewards  and  punishments  through  all  these  centuries,  the 
truth  remains  that  no  man  in  any  century  ever  yet  health- 
ily and  helpfully  desired  heaven  who  did  not  first  desire 


THE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  71 

holiness,  and  no  man  ever  yet  healthily  and  helpfully 
feared  hell  who  did  not  first  fear  sin. 

Perhaps  there  is  no  point  in  all  the  question  of  dealing 
"with  skepticism  more  critical  than  this.  Men  must  be 
made  to  feel  tliat  the  Christian  rehgiou  is  not  a  mass  of 
separate  questions  having  little  connection  with  one  an- 
other, on  all  of  which  a  man  must  have  made  up  his  mind 
before  he  can  be  counted  a  believer.  The  spiritual  unity 
of  the  faith  must  be  brought  out  and  its  simphcity  asserted 
in  the  prominence  given  to  the  personal  life  and  work  of 
Jesus  Christ  and  loyalty  to  Him  as  the  test  of  all  disciple- 
ship.  There  are  excrescences  upon  the  faith  which  23uzzle 
and  bewilder  men  and  make  them  think  themselves  un- 
believers when  their  hearts  are  really  faithful.  Such 
excrescences  must  be  cast  away,  not  by  violent  excision 
from  without,  but  by  the  natural  and  healthy  action  of 
the  system  on  which  they  have  been  fastened,  which,  as  it 
grows  stronger,  will  shed  them,  because  they  do  not  really 
belong  to  it.  There  are  doctrinal  statements  which  have 
done  vast  good  which  yet  were  but  the  temporary  aspects 
of  ti'utli  as  it  struggled  to  its  completest  exliibition.  They 
are  doing  vast  good  to-day,  men  are  lining  by  them  still, 
but  it  is  as  men  are  seeing  still  the  light  of  stars  that 
were  extinguished  in  the  heavens  years  ago.  Such  par- 
tial, temporary  statements  men  are  still  li\dng  by ;  but  the 
time  must  come  when  they  will  disappear,  and  then  it  will 
be  of  all  importance,  when  the  star  goes  out,  whether  the 
men  who  have  been  looking  at  it  and  walking  h\  it  have 
known  all  along  of  the  sun  by  whose  light  it  shone,  and 
which  will  shine  on  after  this  accidental  and  temporary 
point  of  its  exhibition  has  disappeared  forever. 

And  here  appears  another  point.  The  whole  notion  of 
the  simplicity  of  Christianity  and  its  comprehension  in  a 
few  first  large  truths  affects  the  Avay  in  which  we  have  to 
meet  the  special  errors  and  heresies  of  men.    Just  exactly' 


72  ESSAYS  jyiJ   ADDRESSES. 

as  I  will  not  care  nearly  as  much  that  a  man  should  hold 
what  I  believe  to  be  the  truth  about  future  punishment 
as  I  will  that  he  shoukl  be  deeply  convinced  of  the  enor- 
mity and  persistency  of  sin,  so  I  will  not  care  nearly  so 
much  to  disprove  and  displace  a  man's  single  mistake 
upon  some  point  of  doctrine  as  I  will  to  clear  his  heart  of 
the  prejudice  and  darkness  of  which  that  special  mistake 
was  only  one  indication.  Men  are  always  having  their 
heresies  disproved  and  trying  to  give  them  up,  and  then 
finding  in  a  way  that  terrifies  them  that  these  heresies  are 
not  mere  oj)inions  which  they  can  cast  away,  but  parts  of 
themselves  which  they  must  carry  as  long  as  they  are 
what  the}^  are,  until  they  are  spiritually  born  again.  Men's 
attempts  to  escape  from  opinions  which  have  been  spe- 
cifically disproved,  but  to  whose  essential  principles  they 
are  still  attached,  remind  me  of  a  story  of  canine  intelli- 
gence which  I  read  not  long  ago,  in  which  the  dog,  who 
was  held  by  a  chain  which  was  fastened  to  a  collar  round 
his  neck,  and  to  the  other  end  of  which  a  log  was  tied, 
attempted  to  rid  himself  of  the  annoyance  by  burying  the 
log  in  the  ground.  He  dug  a  hole  and  put  the  log  into  it, 
replaced  the  earth  and  stamped  it  down,  and  then,  satis- 
fied with  his  work,  attempted  to  move  away,  but  only 
found  himself  fastened  worse  than  ever.  Before,  he  was 
only  tied  to  the  log,  now  he  was  tied  to  the  place  where 
the  log  was  buried. 

Nor  can  we  forget  here  the  deep  and  essential  con- 
nection between  rehgion  and  morality.  The  day  is  past 
w^hen  they  could  be  set  in  unnatural  hostility.  Like  soul 
and  body,  they  belong  together,  and  when  we  seek  the 
universal  and  eternal  principles  in  which  lies  the  simplic- 
ity of  Christianity,  when  we  try  to  unsnarl  the  essential 
from  the  non-essential,  there  can  be  nothing  like  a  clear 
perception  that  every  truth  is  necessary  to  man  which  is 
necessary  to  righteousness,  and  that  no  truth  is  necessary 


THE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  73 

to  mau  which  is  not  necessary  to  righteousness.  Indeed, 
I  think  that  it  is  in  the  exhibition  of  their  moral  conse- 
quences and  connections  far  more  than  in  the  discov- 
ery of  their  abstract  truth  or  falsehood,  or  their  proof  or 
disproof  from  the  Bible,  that  doctrines  to-day  must  be 
established  or  refuted  in  the  eyes  of  men.  If  atheism  is 
dislodged  out  of  the  minds  of  men  of  this  and  the  next 
generation,  it  will  be  because  they  come  to  sec  that  man 
rejecting  God  becomes  inhuman.  If  fatalism  falls,  it  will 
be  because  it  evidently  saps  responsibility;  and,  on  a 
smaller  field,  if  ritualism  and  the  confessional  are  rejected, 
it  will  be  not  on  doctrinal  but  on  moral  grounds,  because 
men  find  out  that  its  spirit  is  hostile  to  personal  purity 
and  truthfulness. 

I  have  already  indicated,  in  a  word,  what  must  be  the 
power  of  that  simplicity  and  unity  by  which  the  gospel 
can  become  effective.  It  is  the  person  of  Christ.  If  tliere 
has  been  one  change  which  above  all  others  has  altered 
our  modern  Christianity  from  what  the  Christian  religion 
was  in  apostolic  times,  I  think  beyond  all  doul)t  it  nmst 
be  this,  the  substitution  of  a  belief  in  doctrines  for  loyalty  ^ 
to  a  person  as  the  essence  and  the  test  of  Christian  life. 
And  if  there  be  a  revival  which  is  needed  to  make  Chris- 
tianity strong  against  the  enemies  which  beset  her,  and 
clear  in  the  sight  of  the  multitudes  who  are  bewildered 
about  her,  it  certainly  must  be  the  recoronation  of  her 
personal  idea,  the  reassertion  of  the  fact  that  Christ  is 
Christianity,  and  that  not  to  hold  that  this  or  that  con- 
cerning Him.  is  true,  but  to  follow  Him  with  love  and  with 
that  degree  of  knowledge  of  Him  which  has  been  given 
us,  is  to  be  a  Christian.  Allow  me  to  dwell  on  this  for  a 
few  moments,  for  I  feel  its  importance  very  deeply,  and  I 
wish  to  say  one  or  two  things  about  it.  There  are,  then,  "^ 
two  distinct  ideas  of  Christianity.  One  of  them  magnifies 
doctrine,  and  its  great  sin  is  heresy.     The  other  of  them 


74  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

magnifies  obedience,  and  its  great  sin  is  disobedience. 
The  fii'st  enthrones  a  creed.  The  second  enthrones  a  per- 
son. Of  the  second  sort,  not  of  the  first,  is  the  Christi- 
anity of  the  New  Testament ;  of  the  first  sort,  not  of  tlie 
second,  has  been  a  very  large  part  of  the  Christianity  of 
Christendom.  I  am  sure  tliat  every  tlioughtfnl  man  must 
see  tliat  the  question  is  not  one  of  exclusion  but  of  prece- 
dence. A  doctrinal  religion  must  be  personal  if  the  doc- 
trine has  relation,  however  remotely,  to  a  personal  history ; 
and  a  personal  religion  must  be  doctrinal,  since  love  and 
obedience  can  live  and  act  intelligently  only  in  the  light 
of  knowledge  concerning  him  who  is  loved  and  obeyed. 
But  stiU  the  difference  remains  between  the  presentation 
of  religion  as  a  scheme  of  truth  to  be  believed  and  the 
presentation  of  religion  as  a  j^erson  to  be  believed  in,  and 
it  is  the  latter  that  in  these  days  I  think  is  the  secret 
of  the  best  method  of  dealing  in  the  pulpit  with  popular 
skepticism. 

For  personahty  is  the  only  simplicity  Avhicli  holds  in 
itself  completeness.  I  well  remember  the  first  sermon 
that  I  ever  achieved.  The  text  was  from  2  Corinthians 
xi.  3,  ''  The  simplicity  that  is  in  Christ,"  and  a  cruel  class- 
mate's criticism  of  it  was  that  "  there  was  very  little  sim- 
plicity in  the  sermon,  and  no  Christ."  I  am  afraid  that 
ho  was  right,  and  I  am  sure  that  the  sermon  ne\^er  was 
preached  again.  Its  lack  of  simplicity  and  lack  of  Clmst 
no  doubt  belonged  together.  It  was  probably  an  attempt 
to  define  doctrine  instead  of  to  show  a  man,  a  God,  a 
Saviour.  For  tliink  a  moment  if  it  is  not  true  that 
personality  is  the  only  power  in  which  mystery  can 
become  real  and  vital  and  practical.  You  describe  thought, 
love,  hope,  fear,  life  itself,  and  men  are  aU  bewildered. 
You  set  a  living,  loving,  thinking,  hoping,  fearing  man 
before  them,  and  without  the  loss  of  one  particle  of  the 
mystery  which  your  abstractions  tried  to  describe,  the 


THE  FULPIT  AND   POPULAR   SKEPTICISM.  10 

emotion,  the  condition,  the  being  is  instantly  real  and 
realized.  A  child  learns  life  in  the  interpretation  of 
fatherhood.  Now  if  at  the  bottom  the  secret  of  skepti- 
cism is  the  unreality  of  religion  to  the  skeptical  soul ;  if 
it  is  not  mystery  but  the  inability  to  seize  and  realize 
mystery  that  makes  the  trouble ;  if  we  believe  in  a  Christ 
so  completely  powerful  that  once  pei'f ectly  present  with  a 
human  soul  He  must  master  it  and  it  must  yield  to  Him ; 
if  the  reason  why  men  doubt  Him  is  that  they  do  not, 
cannot,  will  not  see  Him,  then  I  think  it  must  be  certain 
that  what  they  need  is  a  completer,  liver  presentation  of 
His  personality,  so  that  He  shall  stand  before  them  and 
claim  what  always  was  His  claim,  "Believe  in  Me" — not 
''Beheve  tliis  or  that  about  Me,"  but  "Believe  in  Me." 
That  always  is  the  faith  of  the  Gospels.  Tliey  had  no 
creed  but  Christ.  Christ  was  their  creed.  And  it  is  the 
glory  of  the  earliest  Church  that  it  had  for  its  people  no 
demanded  creed  of  abstract  doctrine  whatsoever.  In  the 
veneral^le  wisdom  of  the  apostolic  symbol  it  believed  in 
Father,  Son,  and  Spirit,  the  one  eternal  Grod. 

Let  me  remind  you  also  how  in  the  personal  conception 
of  Christianity,  continually,  carefully  preserved,  lies  the 
hope  and  even  the  chance  of  the  minister's  growth  and 
advance  without  the  dislodgment  either  of  his  own  or  of 
his  hearers'  faith.  Many  ministers  to-day  are  kept  from 
the  larger  thought  and  knowledge  about  rehgious  things 
to  which  their  spirits  and  the  times  are  urging  them  be- 
cause they  fear  that  any  change  of  views  will  ruin  the 
power  of  their  ministry  by  making  them  seem  inconsis- 
tent with  themselves.  How  can  they  say  to  the  people, 
"  This  does  not  seem  to  me  now  as  it  seemed  a  year  ago," 
and  yet  hope  to  see  the  people's  faith,  which  was  grounded 
on  that  teaching  of  a  year  ago,  continue  ?  But  this  is  a 
difficulty  which  belongs  entu-ely  to  the  dogmatic  conce]> 
tion  of  Christianity.    The  personal  conception  is  not  trou- 


76  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

bled  with  it,  I  may  freely  say,  ''  The  friend  whom  I  bid 
you  to  know  a  year  ago,  see,  he  is  different,  he  is  greater, 
wider,  wiser,  deeper  than  I  thonght,"  and  you  may  be  all 
the  more  ready  to  see  Him  now  because  of  the  partial 
knowledge  of  Him  to  which  it  was  my  privilege  to  help 
you  then.  A  personal  relation  offers  the  highest  pic- 
ture of  the  combination  of  stability  with  progress,  but  an 
intellectual  conception  is  always  sacrificing  stability  to 
progress  or  else  progress  to  stability. 

Again,  in  the  prominence  of  the  personal  conception 
lies  the  only  reality  of  Christian  union,  and  if  the  division 
of  Christians  is  a  chief  cause  of  skepticism  anything  that 
helps  Christians  into  unity  must  minister  to  faith.  I  do 
»/•-  not  see  the  slightest  promise  in  any  dimmest  distance  of 
what  is  called  the  organic  unity  of  Christendom  on  the 
basis  of  episcopacy  or  upon  any  other  basis.  I  do  not  see 
the  slightest  chance  of  the  entire  harmonizing  of  Chris- 
tian doctrine  throughout  the  Christian  world,  that  dream 
which  men  have  dreamed  ever  since  Christ  ascended  into 
heaven,  that  sight  which  no  man's  eye  has  seen  in  any 
age.  But  I  do  see  signs  that,  keeping  their  different 
thoughts-  concerning  Him  and  His  teachings,  men,  loyal 
to  Christ,  owning  His  love,  trusting  His  love,  may  be 
united  in  the  only  union  which  is  realty  valuable  wherever 
His  blessed  name  is  known.  In  that  union,  and  in  that 
alone,  can  I  find  myself  truly  one  alike  with  Peter  and 
with  Paul,  alike  with  Origen  and  Athanasius  and  Augus- 
tine, alike  with  Luther  and  with  Zwingle  and  with  Calvin 
and  with  St.  Francis  and  with  Bishop  Andrews  and  with 
Dr.  Channing,  alike  with  the  prelate  who  ordains  me  and 
with  the  Methodist  or  Baptist  brother  who  is  trying  to 
bring  men  to  the  same  Christ  in  the  same  street  where  I 
am  working.  And  no  union  which  will  not  include  all 
these  ought  to  wholly  satisfy  us,  because  no  other  will 
wholly  satisfy  the  last  great  prater  of  Jesus. 


TEE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAB   SKEPTICISM.  11 

My  one  great  compreliensive  answer,  then,  to  the  ques- 
tion, What  is  the  best  method  of  dealing  in  the  pulpit 
with  popular  skepticism  ?  is  reall}^  this :  make  known  and 
real  to  men  by  every  means  you  can  command  the  per- 
sonal Christ,  not  doctrine  about  Him,  but  Him ;  strike 
at  the  tyranii}^  of  the  physical  life  by  the  i^ower  of  His 
spiritual  presence.  Let  faith  mean,  make  faith  mean, 
trusting  Him  and  trying  to  obey  Him.  Call  any  man  a 
Christian  who  is  following  Him.  Denounce  no  error  as 
fatal  which  does  not  separate  a  soul  from  Him.  Offer 
Hun  to  the  world  as  He  offered  and  is  fore^^er  offering 
Himself. 

I  know  that  this  is  perfectly  unsatisfactory.  "Why, 
this  is  just  what  I  would  do,"  you  say,  "  if  there  were  not 
a  skeptic  in  the  land."  Of  course  it  is,  and  it  may  be  that 
it  is  about  time  to  say  what  I  ought  perhaps  to  have  said 
when  I  began  my  essay,  that  I  do  not  believe  in,  at  least 
I  do  not  know  any  way  in  which  popular  skepticism  as 
such  and  by  itself  is  to  be  dealt  with  in  the  pulpit.  Tliat 
confession,  I  know,  leaves  but  very  little  value  in  my  essay. 
But  I  do  think  that  the  preacher  who  is  conscious  of  skep- 
ticism, and  counts  it  his  duty  to  meet  it  and  deal  Avith  it 
directly  in  his  preaching,  is  sure  to  preach  very  differently 
and  to  reach  very  different  results  from  Christ  and  His 
Apostles,  and  all  the  great  preachers  of  all  time.  There- 
fore I  have  dared  to  dwell  wholly  on  positive  methods. 
He  who  is  building  up  health  is  thereby  conquering  dis- 
ease. He  who  is  preaching  truth  is  thereby  confuting 
error.  He  who  is  making  men  obedient  to  Christ  is 
thereby  rescuing  them  from  their  slavery  to  themselves, 
from  their  self-will  and  self-trust,  which  is  the  root  and 
fruit  of  all  the  skepticism  Avhich  is  really  harmful.  I  think 
the  men  who  confute  skepticism  are  always  the  positive, 
not  the  negative  men — not  the  men  who  disprove  error, 
but  the  men  who  make  faith. 


78  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

And  yet  I  would  not  be  completely  unsatisfactory  if  I 
can  help  it.  And  so  before  I  close  I  would  venture  to 
state  as  briefly  and  clearly  as  I  can  ten  things,  which,  as 
it  seems  to  me,  a  preacher  in  his  pulpit  now  may  do  to 
make  the  time  in  which  we  live  less  skeptical,  and  so  to 
help  forward  the  ages  of  faith  which  are  sure  some  day  to 
come,  and  are  sure  when  they  come  to  be  ages  of  better 
faith  than  any  which  the  ages  past  can  show. 

1.  It  is  needful  that  our  clergymen  should  be  far  more 
familiar  than  they  are  now  with  the  character  of  the  skep- 
ticism by  which  they  are  siu-rounded.  The  popular  skep- 
ticism is  one  in  source  and  reall}^  one  in  character  with 
the  skepticism  of  the  schools  and  of  the  scholars.  The 
minister  ought  to  be  acquainted  with  the  newest  develop- 
ments of  thought,  not  in  their  details,  not  so  that  he  can 
completely  discuss  them  from  the  puli:)it,  for  that  is  impos- 
sible, and  the  attempt  to  do  it  only  hurts  the  Christian 
cause  and  makes  the  Christian  minister  often  ridiculous. 
But  he  ought  to  be  so  familiar  with  what  men  are  think- 
ing and  believing  that  he  can  know  the  currents  of  pres- 
ent thought,  see  where  they  cross  and  oppose,  where  they 
may  be  made  to  harmoinze  with  the  thought  of  Christ. 
This  familiarity  is  something  which  must  be  constantly 
kept  up  in  the  active  ministry.  But  its  foundations  ought 
to  be  laid  in  the  theological  school.  And  here  more  than 
anywhere  else  one  fears,  I  think,  for  the  faithfulness  with 
which  our  theological  schools  are  doing  their  whole  duty 
by  their  students  and  the  times.  I  cannot  doubt,  as  I 
look  back,  that  many  of  our  noisiest  and  most  faithfid 
teachers  have  failed  to  realize  how  much  their  boys  needed 
to  be  furnished  with  an  understanding  of  the  precise 
nature  of  the  unbelief  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  of 
the  character  of  thought  in  which  that  unbelief  would 
show  itself  among  the  people  to  whom  those  lioys  when 
they  were  ministers  would  have  to  preach.     The}'  might 


THE  PULPIT  AND   POPULJE   SKEPTICISM.  79 

have  saved  many  of  tlieir  seliolars  more  than  one  anxious 
hour,  and  more  than  one  emljarrassing  surprise. 

2.  The  second  necessity  is  that  every  preacher  shoukl 
clear  up  his  own  faith ;  that  each  man  should  decide  just 
what  lie  believes  himself.  Let  us  not  be  allowing  men  to 
think  from  what  we  sa}^  that  we  demand  of  them  a  faith 
which  we  have  not  ourselves.  Let  us  triist  truth.  There 
is  nothing  so  terrible  as  the  glimpses  that  we  get  occa- 
sionally into  a  minister's  unbelief,  and  sometimes  the  con- 
fusion which  exists  below  seems  to  be  great  just  in  pro- 
portion to  the  hard  positivencss  of  dogmatism  which  men 
see  upon  the  surface.  The  most  pitiable  and  powerless 
of  all  preachers  is  he  who  tries  to  preach  doctrine  which 
his  own  soul  does  not  really  believe  and  use. 

3.  And  thirdl}^,  the  minister  in  days  like  these  ought  to 
make  it  his  duty  as  well  as  his  right  to  claim  and  express 
the  fullest  fellowship  of  faith  with  all  believers,  whatever 
Christian  name  they  bear.  There  is  need  of  the  solidity 
of  faith  being  made  manifest.  Let  not  religion  come  to 
seem  to  men  the  affair  of  a  party.  Let  us  insist  that  when 
the  iiost  is  against  us  we  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  the 
miserable  business  of  making  hits  and  flinging  captious 
criticisms  at  one  another.  I  think  that  hardly  any  man 
does  more  for  popular  skepticism  than  he  wdio,  while  the 
world  is  trembling  on  the  brink  of  atheism,  spends  his  life 
in  championing  the  shibboleths  of  his  denomination. 

4.  We  ought  never  to  seem  to  have  despaired  of  truth, 
and  to  have  left  the  region  of  thought,  and  to  have  re- 
treated into  organization  and  drill  as  safe  refuges.  This 
is  just  what  ecclesiasticism  and  ritualism  seem  to  the 
world  to  have  done,  and  the  world  is  largely  right.  This 
of  all  others  is  the  time  to  keep  Baptism  and  the  Lord's 
Supper  reasonable  and  spiritual  and  grandly  simple,  and 
to  guard  them  from  all  suspicion  of  magic  and  mechanics. 

5.  Never  forget  to  tell  the  young  people  frankly  that 


80  JiSSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

tliey  are  to  expect  more  liglit  and  larger  developments  of 
the  triitli  wliicli  you  give  them.  Oh,  the  souls  that  have 
been  made  skeptics  by  the  mere  clamoring  of  new  truth 
to  add  itself  to  that  which  they  have  been  taught  to  think 
finished  and  final ! 

6.  These  are  no  times  for  trimming.  He  is  weak  to- 
day who  does  not  preach  the  highest  spirituality  to  the 
materialist,  and  the  highest  morality  to  the  profligate. 
The  unbelievers  of  to-day  despise  compromise,  and  love 
to  hear  the  fullest  truth. 

7.  We  need  to  remember  how  irreligion  has  invaded 
religion,  and  to  imitate  its  methods.  It  has  got  hold  of 
the  passions  and  enthusiasms  of  men,  and  there  has  been 
its  strength.  We  must  claim  those  passions  and  enthusi- 
asms for  religion.  No  cold  faith  or  preaching  will  reclaim 
the  world. 

8.  The  life  of  Jesus  must  be  the  center  of  all  believing 
and  all  preaching.  Not  abstract,  but  personal,  is  the  sav- 
ing power.  "Behold  the  Lamb  of  God,"  "Behold  the 
Man,"  those  are  the  summons  to  which  men  will  always 
listen. 

9.  The  Chiu'ch  must  put  off  her  look  of  selfishness. 
She  must  first  deeply  feel  and  then  frankly  say  that  she 
exists  only  as  the  picture  of  what  the  world  ought  to  be. 
Not  as  the  ark  where  a  choice  few  may  take  refuge  from 
the  flood,  but  as  the  promise  and  potency  of  the  new 
heavens  and  the  new  earth  she  must  offer  herself  to  men. 

10.  And  tenth,  above  almost  everything,  to-day  you  and 
I  must  keep  our  means  worthy  of  oiu*  ends.  Long  enough 
have  preachers  asked  men  to  believe  in  a  pure  and  lofty 
truth  which  was  administered  in  impure  and  sordid  meth- 
ods. Down  to  the  least  argument  we  use,  down  to  the 
least  bit  of  church  machinery  that  clicks  in  some  Dorcas 
Society  or  guild-room,  let  the  truth  and  dignity  of  God 
be  felt. 


THE  PULPIT  AND   POPULAR  SKEPTICISM.  81 

These  are  tlie  ten.  I  dare  not  say  that  the  preacher 
who  tries  to  do  all  these  things  will  change  all  the  skep- 
ticism aroniid  him  into  faith,  bnt  I  am  sure  that  he  will 
live  a  very  bra\^e,  healthy,  happy,  useful  life  while  he  is 
busy  in  his  struggle. 

For  behind  liim  he  will  always  feel  the  power  of  the 
great  God  and  dear  Lord  for  whom  he  worked,  and  he 
will  know  that,  whether  by  him  or  not,  that  God  and  Lord 
must  certainly  some  day  assert  His  truth. 

And  before  him,  however  dark  the  great  mass  of  un- 
belief may  still  remain,  he  will  see  single  souls  catching 
the  truth  and  shining  with  a  goodness  and  joy  which  must 
become  new  centers  of  faith. 


ADDRESS    AT   THE   TWO    HUNDRED    AND    FIF- 
TIETH COMMEMORATION  OF  THE  FOUNDA- 
TION OF  THE  FIRST  CHURCH  IN  BOSTON. 

(November  18,  1880.) 

I  THANK  yon  very  much  for  allowing  me  to  say  a  few 
words,  and  I  will  lionestly  try  that  they  shall  be  very  few. 
I  should  like  to  say  something  of  the  impression  which 
this  celebration  of  John  Cotton  makes  upon  one  of  his 
descendants.  My  connection  with  my  very  great  grand- 
father is  so  remote  that  I  may  venture  to  speak  of  him 
without  hesitation.  I  am  so  full  of  pleasure  in  life,  and 
so  full  of  the  sense  that  that  pleasure  is  very  much  in- 
creased by  its  being  my  happiness  to  hve  in  Boston,  that 
I  cannot  but  be  grateful  to  him  who  had  a  great  deal  to 
do  with  my  living  at  all,  and  a  great  deal  to  do  with  mak- 
ing Boston  what  it  is  for  a  man  to  live  in.  I  am  not  sure 
that  he  would  accept  of  his  representative.  I  am  not  sure 
that  if  he  saw  me  standing  here  and  speaking  any  words 
in  his  praise,  and  knew  exactly  where  I  was  standing,  there 
might  not  be  some  words  rising  to  his  lips  that  would 
show  that  neither  I  nor  you  were  wholly  what  he  could 
approve.  He  might  say  prelatist,  he  might  say  heretic. 
He  might  call  me  by  the  first  name,  call  both  of  us  by 
the  second  name ;  and  yet  that  criticism,  as  we  stand  in 
the  presence  of  his  memory  on  this  commemoration  day, 
would  make  absolutely  no  difference.  John  Cotton,  in 
the  life  into  which  he  has  passed,  now  looks  deeper  and 


THE  FIRST  CHUECH  IX  BOSTON.  83 

looks  mder,  and  we  have  a  right  to  enter  into  communioii 
■with  the  spirit  of  the  man,  and  not  simply  with  his  spe- 
cific opinions  or  the  ways  in  which  he  worshiped ;  we  may 
claim  liim,  at  least,  as  one  who  w^ould  honor  oui'  recogni- 
tion of  him,  as  one  whom  we  are  at  liberty  to  honor.  It 
would  be  a  terrible  thing,  it  would  narrow  our  life  and 
make  it  very  meager,  if  we  had  no  right  to  honor  and  to 
di'aw  inspu-ation  from  auy  men  except  those  we  agree 
with  and  who  would  approve  of  us.  As  we  look  abroad 
thi'ough  history  and  around  through  the  world,  I  think 
sometimes  that  our  noblest  inspirations  and  our  best 
teachings  have  come  from  the  men  who,  when  we  com- 
pare our  views  mth  theii's,  are  very  far  from  us ;  of 
whom,  when  we  ask  for  their  approbation  of  us,  we  have 
to  beg  with  very  hesitating  lips.  And  so  we  may  at  least 
claim  the  privilege  of  Jolm  Cotton  that  he  shaU  give  us 
the  inspiration  of  pajdng  him  our  honor. 

And  it  seems  to  me  that  a  man  who  stands,  as  this  man 
stands,  at  the  beginning  of  the  history  of  a  nation  or  a 
town,  is  an  everlasting  benefaction  to  the  town  or  nation. 
It  is  an  example  that  never  can  be  exhausted.  The  way 
in  which  Washington  stands  at  the  beginning  of  the  na- 
tional history  and  sends  down  a  perpetual  power,  full  of 
strength  and  Ijeauty ,  is  the  great  t^-pical  American  instance 
of  the  way  in  which,  at  the  beginning  of  the  history  of 
every  town,  of  ever}-  city,  of  every  State,  of  every  institu- 
tion, there  will  l)e  these  t^-pieal  men.  Our  "Western  States 
are  gathering  them  now,  just  as  oui-  Eastern  States  gath- 
ered them  two  hundi-ed  years  ago ;  and  the  earnest,  faith- 
ful ministers  and  the  consecrated  men  who  are  dedicating 
themselves  to  the  building  up  of  institutions  in  our  West- 
ern land  are  going  to  pass  into  that  perhaps  mythical,  but 
perhaps  for  that  reason  all  the  ti-uer  and  more  genuine, 
admii-ation  into  which  they  who  founded  our  institutions 
two  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago  have  passed  now.     For 


84  JESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

liis  standing  at  the  beginning  of  our  history  and  sending 
us  his  inspiration  perpetually  we  thank  John  Cotton. 

And  I  thank  him,  as  a  Church-of -England  man,  as  a 
man  loving  the  Episcopal  Church  with  all  my  heart,  I 
thauk  him  for  being  a  Puritan.  I  thank  him  for  giving 
me  a  renewed  assurance  of  that  which  all  history  teaches 
me  to  believe,  and  that  which  my  knowledge  of  God  would 
make  me  belie"\re  if  no  illustration  of  it  were  written  in 
history,  that  God  will  not  permit  a  Church  to  become  cor- 
rupt, and  degenerate,  and  unfaithful  to  its  duties  without 
sending  a  man  who  shall  bear  testimony  against  it  and 
stir  it  to  the  regeneration  of  its  life.  The  Church  of  Eng- 
land has  no  men  to  thank  to-day  more  devoutly.  Not  her 
great  scholars,  her  great  orators,  her  noble  teachers,  her 
splendid  missionaries !  She  has  no  men  to  whom  she 
ought  to  be  more  grateful  to-day  than  to  the  Puritans 
who  told  her  in  the  seventeenth  century  how  degraded 
her  life  was  becoming. 

But  when  I  recall  the  name  of  this  church,  it  fills  me 
with  still  other  feelings  of  gratitude.  "  The  First  Church 
of  Christ !  "  I  think  there  is  infinite  suggestion,  infinite 
poetry,  in  the  thought  of  the  first  church  of  Christ  in  any 
land.  If  a  man  feels,  as  the  disciples  of  Christ  do  feel, 
that  all  the  earth  is  His ;  if  we  believe  that  whatever  ele- 
ments of  good  the  savage  lands  have  brought  forth  they 
have  brought  forth  by  the  inspiration  of  His  Spirit  work- 
ing even  where  His  name  has  been  unknown,  and  that  all 
these  lands  are  Avaiting  for  the  touch  of  the  Christ  they 
cannot  recognize  to  be  quickened  into  a  life  they  have  not 
guessed  of  yet — then  what  shall  we  think  of  that  Church 
which  stands  perpetually  bearing  the  proud  record  in  its 
name  that  it  was  the  first  to  bring  the  everlasting  and 
universal  Christ  into  a  new  section,  a  new  district  of  the 
world  ?  Here,  for  the  first  time,  when  the  First  Church 
of  Christ  was  started,  that  became  possible  which  had 


TJSE  FIBST  CHURCH  IN  BOSTON.  85 

been  impossible  before.  No  church  cau  stand  here  in 
Boston  to  the  very  end  of  time  that  must  not  humbly  owe 
and  pay  its  debt  of  gratitude  to  the  First  Church  of  Christy 
that  set  His  name  upon  these  hills  and  made  the  winds 
vocal  with  the  new  ideas  of  His  gospel. 

The  seventeenth  and  the  nineteenth  centuries  belong 
wonderfully  together.  The  seventeenth  centmy  was  a 
time  of  deep  rehgious  conviction;  the  nineteenth  century 
boasts  itself  of  large  toleration.  It  is  perfectly  natm-al  to 
find,  as  we  look  into  the  history  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury, that  to  deep  conviction  toleration  was  again  and 
again  sacrificed ;  and  as  we  look  into  the  history  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  we  can  see  we  have  not  yet  obtained 
such  a  large  and  symmetrical  manhood  that  one  is  not 
still  sacrificed  to  the  other,  and  find  again  and  again  con- 
viction sacrificed  to  toleration.  It  would  be  a  poor  world 
to  live  in  if  it  could  get  to  the  end  of  itself  in  nineteen 
centmies,  and  there  were  not  others  before  us  greater  and 
better.  That  is  one  of  the  elements  by  which  the  future 
centuries  will  be  made  better ;  we  must  look  to  the  com- 
bining together  in  the  same  character  of  those  elements 
which  have  existed  in  different  centuries  thus  far.  When 
absolute  religious  conviction  shall  abide  side  by  side  witli 
earnest  toleration ;  when  men  shall  believe  with  all  their 
hearts,  as  they  believed  in  the  seventeenth  century,  and 
at  the  same  time  be  willing  that  other  men  shall  believe 
differentl}',  as  they  are  now  in  the  nineteenth  century ; 
when  toleration  shall  not  be  oppressed  by  conviction  of 
religious  truth  ;  and  when  private  thought  and  belief  with 
regard  to  religious  truth  shall  make  men  all  the  more  ten- 
der and  jealous  of  the  rights  of  other  men's  consciences — 
then  there  wQl  come  a  century  which,  combining  the  bless- 
ings of  the  seventeenth  and  the  nineteenth,  shall  make  a 
nobler  world  to  live  in  than  we  have  seen  yet — the  time 
that  has  been  prophesied,  but  has  not  yet  come,  when 


86  2:55 J  r^  AXD   ADDSHSSES. 

merer  and  truth  shall  dwell  together,  when  righteousness 
and  peace  shall  kiss  each  other.  That  our  celebration 
may  help  the  coming  of  that  day  I  am  sm'C  is  the  prayer 
of  every  one  who  joins  in  any  of  these  commemoration 
services. 


ADDRESS   AT    THE    THIRTIETH   ANNIVERSARY 

OF  THE  BOSTON  YOUNG  MEN'S  CHRISTIAN 

ASSOCIATION,  MUSIC  HALL,  MAY  22,  1881. 

Mr.  President,  Ladies,  and  Gentleimen  :  It  is  both  as 
a  citizen  of  Boston  and  as  a  Christian  minister  that  I  re- 
joice most  heartity  in  the  privilege  of  being-  here  to-night, 
and  saying  a  few  words  in  recognition  of  the  good  work 
that  the  Christian  Association  has  done,  and  is  doing,  and 
is  going  to  do  in  the  city  of  Boston.  It  belongs  to  an  an- 
niversary occasion  like  this  to  recall  the  principles  which 
underlie  all  the  work  of  the  association  and  are  its  in- 
spiration. Just  as  a  birthday  brings  back  to  a  man  the 
ultimate  fact  of  his  existence,  and  makes  him  think  of 
himself  in  those  relations  which,  in  the  ordinary  details 
of  his  life,  he  is  very  likel}^  to  forget,  so  man}^  things  in 
the  work  of  the  association  which  may  be  lost  sight  of  to 
some  extent  in  the  multitude  of  its  details  come  back  to 
us  on  this  anniversary  occasion.  We  need  to  remember 
that  the  existence  of  this  association  is  due  to  the  applica- 
tion of  certain  principles,  and  we  need  to  strengthen  our- 
selves, and  to  say  the  words  by  w^hich  we  can  strengthen 
those  who  have  the  administration  of  the  affairs  of  the 
institution,  in  devotion  to  the  principles  which  lie  at  the 
root  of  their  work.  I  suppose  the  first  feeling  which  at- 
taches to  Christian  Associations — this  and  multitude  of 
others  like  it  which  are  scattered  all  over  our  country, 
and,  indeed,  throughout  a  large  part  of  the  Christian 
world  to-day — is  a  thought  of  safety.     The  idea  of  the 


88  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

peril  of  luiman  life  grows  as  human  life  becomes  more 
complicated.  That  idea  of  peril  and  danger  is  most  of  all 
associated  with  the  large  cities,  where  human  life  becomes 
complicated  above  all  other  places  in  the  world.  Life, 
which  seemed  to  be  so  simple  in  the  village — although  I 
am  not  for  myself  sure  that  the  perils  of  the  city  are 
larger  than  the  perils  of  the  village — yet  becomes  so  much 
more  complicated  in  the  city  than  in  the  village  that  the 
j'^oung  man  who  comes  from  the  country  into  the  city 
seems  to  be  entering  into  perils  and  dangers  which  did 
not  surround  him  when  at  home.  It  is  the  principle  of 
Christianity  and  the  Christian  Church,  and  this  great  in- 
stitution and  other  Christian  institutions,  everywhere,  to 
recognize  that  peril,  and  to  stand  as  a  guard  over  the 
safety  of  the  young  man  who  comes  into  the  city.  But 
when  we  say  this,  it  seems  to  me  that  we  want  to  recog- 
nize what  the  Christian  idea  of  safety  is.  There  is  an  idea 
of  safety  which  is  constantly  creeping  into  the  regions  of 
Christianity  that  is  not  the  true  Christian  idea  of  safety. 
There  is  an  idea  of  safety  which  rests  upon  seclusion  of  a 
life  and  tries  to  keep  a  man  by  putting  walls  around  him. 
The  Christian  idea  of  safety  is  a  larger  idea  than  that : 
the  scheme  of  the  New  Testament  is  sah^ation.  ^'  I  will 
show  him  My  salvation  "  is  the  promise  God  has  made  to 
man  through  all  the  wondrous  Book,  both  in  the  New 
Testament  and  in  the  Old.  Now,  try  to  put  in  the  i)lace 
of  the  word  "  salvation  "  the  word  "  safety,"  and  see  how 
you  have  taken  the  soul  out  of  the  New  Testament,  and 
the  beauty  that  springs  from  it.  The  salvation  of  the 
New  Testament  is  something  vastly  more  than  we  put 
into  the  single  word  "  safet3^"  The  salvation  of  the  New 
Testament  is  something  positive.  We  mean  by  the  word 
"  safety  "  something  negative.  The  New  Testament  idea 
has  this  great  principle  in  it,  this  is  the  soul  of  it — that 
the  only  way  to  bring  about  salvation  for  a  man  in  this 


THE   YOUNG  MEN'S   CHRISTIAN  ASSOCIATION.       89 

world,  or  any  other  world,  is  not  by  tlie  building-  of  walls 
around  liini,  but  by  tlie  putting  of  life  within  him.  There 
ai-e  two  ideas  which  are  associated  with  that  word  "  safe- 
ty," with  that  whole  class  of  words.  We  may  think  of  a 
man  saved  from  danger  simply  by  being  put  where  dan- 
ger cannot  get  at  him.  The  idea  of  the  Christian  religion 
everywhere  is  something  different  from  that,  something 
vastl}'  nobler  than  that.  The  saved  man  of  the  New 
Testament  is  a  man  so  full  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  which  is 
the  true  life  of  human  kind,  that  he  can  go  into  the  midst 
of  danger  and  pass  through  it  unhurt.  The  true  idea  of 
salvation,  as  it  is  given  to  us  in  the  Bible,  is  the  idea  of  a 
nuxn  into  whom  there  has  been  put,  by  the  Lord  of  life, 
such  a  stream  of  continual  and  complete  vitality  that  he 
walks  through  the  midst  of  danger  and  casts  the  danger 
aside  from  him,  as  the  sunbeam  casts  the  cloud  away  when 
it  is  shining  down  upon  the  earth. 

Now,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  great  beauty  of  such  an 
association  as  this  is  in  that  it  is  based,  very  largely,  at 
least,  upon  the  New  Testament  idea  of  salvation.  It  is 
not  an  institution  which  tries  merely  to  build  safeguards 
around  the  life  of  a  j^oung  man.  It  is  a  positive  institu- 
tion in  all  its  work.  It  tries  to  give  a  man  the  highest 
thoughts  of  life,  the  highest  impulses  of  life.  It  is  an 
educational  institution  and  a  working  institution.  It  fills 
a  man  with  ideas,  and  it  fills  a  man  with  motives ;  and 
these  are  the  two  things  that  keep  the  total  man  alive.  A 
man  perils  intellect  if  he  has  not  ideas ;  a  man  perils 
morality  if  he  has  not  high  motives;  and  therefore,  an 
institution  which  brings  to  him  also  work,  supplying  him 
with  continual  motives  through  contact  with  his  fellow- 
men — that  is  an  institution  which  really  brings  salvation 
to  a  man.  The  ship  that  sails  forth  upon  the  sea  is  anx- 
ious for  its  safety ;  but  if  it  were  only  anxious  for  its 
safety  it  would  linger  at  the  wharf,  and  be  eaten  up  by 


90  ESSAYS  AXV   ADDBESSES. 

the  rot  of  time.  Only  as  it  strikes  forth  into  the  sea,  and 
sails  straight  onward  to  its  port,  is  its  true  safety  and 
usefulness  secured.  The  soldier  going  into  battle  trem- 
bles at  the  danger  before  him ;  but  he  knows  that  the 
only  escape  from  danger  is  to  forget  danger,  and  go  right 
onward  in  his  work.  The  man  who  looks  forward  in  the 
world,  and  sees  how  thicldy  human  life  is  surrounded  by 
the  dangers  of  disease,  finds  himself  filled  with  fear ;  but 
the  true  man  learns  that  not  by  guarding  against  disease, 
biit  by  filling  himself  full  of  health,  by  healthy  work,  he 
is  really  preserving  himself  from  the  dangers  that  are 
besetting  him  of  pestilence  on  every  side.  So  in  this  great, 
positive  thought  of  salvation,  in  the  idea  of  salvation  not 
as  a  rescue  from  some  punishment  here  or  hereafter, 
but  as  the  doing  of  the  work  of  God,  by  the  strength  of 
God,  the  soul  attains  its  highest  life,  and  casts  its  dan- 
ger aside  without  even  knowing  it.  This,  it  seems  to  me, 
is  what  the  Christian  world  is  coming  to  learn  more  aud 
more.  The  Christian  world  up  to  this  time  has  dwelt 
very  largely  in  the  thought  of  what  would  happen  to 
mankind  if  it  were  bad.  There  is  now  coming  to  man- 
kind and  to  the  Christian  world  a  revelation  of  the  noble- 
ness of  doing  right.  There  is  coming  to  the  Christian 
world  in  the  3'eai-s  before  us  a  great  manifestation  of  the 
glory  of  holiness  that  is  goiug  to  make  men  almost  sink 
out  of  sight  the  punishment  of  sin.  This,  it  seems  to  me, 
is  the  real  truth,  the  real  promise  that  lies  at  the  root  of 
all  this  shaking  of  men's  thoughts  Avitli  regard  to  the 
punishments  of  the  other  life.  Men  have  not  come  to 
doubt  that  sin  in  this  world,  which  is  governed  by  a  just 
God,  must  necessarily  bring  punishment ;  but  men  are 
coming  to  doubt  whether  the  fear  of  the  punishment 
that  sin  is  to  bring  is  the  God-ordained  motive  that  is 
going  to  save  men  from  their  sin.  Men  are  coming  to 
believe  more  and  more,  and  they  will  come  to  believe 


THE    YOUNG   MEN'S   CHRISTIAN  ASSOCIATION.       91 

fnlly,  that  the  real  impulse  which  ought  to  be  the  salva- 
tion of  mankind  is  the  delight  and  glory  of  serving  God 
with  those  powers  which,  as  they  go  forth  nnder  his  com- 
mandment, and  are  filled  with  his  inspiration,  more  and 
more  iDear  witness  to  themselves  as  the  true,  active,  iden- 
tifying powers  of  our  human  life.  Now,  it  seems  to  me 
that  here  is  the  first  thing  we  have  got  to  congratulate 
ourselves  upon  in  the  existence  and  the  progress  and 
growth  of  this  Christian  Association  in  our  city.  It 
preaches  salvation  by  preaching  truth  and  by  preaching 
work  ■  by  bringing  men  into  the  power  of  Him  who  is  a 
Saviour,  not  because  He  l)uilds  a  wall  around  any  soul 
which  He  takes  into  His  service,  but  because  He  takes 
every  soul  that  is  willing  to  serve  Him,  and  fills  it  with  a 
divine  hunger  for  truth,  and  a  divine  passion  for  good 
works  and  humanity,  which  will  be  the  real  salvation  of 
the  soul  from  error  on  the  one  side  and  from  weakness  on 
the  other.  It  is,  therefore,  a  saving  institution.  It  repre- 
sents the  saving  power  that  is  in  the  city. 

When  one  speaks  of  it  so,  he  speaks  of  it  very  largely 
with  reference  to  a  single  life.  Let  me  say  a  word  or  two 
with  regard  to  the  power  of  such  an  association  as  this, 
and  all  this  association  represents,  as  it  relates  to  the  life 
of  a  community.  No  one  can  think  of  it  merely  with 
reference  to  those  individuals  who  happen  to  be  directly 
connected  with  it.  I  should  be  sorry  to  think  that  the 
Christian  Association  limited  its  good  work  to  the  eleva- 
tion of  those  whose  names  are  written  upon  its  muster- 
roUs.  It  represents  a  great  power  for  good  in  the  com- 
munity ever3^where.  What  the  community  needs  are 
these  two  things — peace  and  elevation.  The  life  of  a 
community,  the  life  of  a  man  with  his  feUow-nian,  halts 
and  staggers,  because  it  is  fuU  of  animosities  and  dissen- 
sions on  the  one  side,  and  because  it  grovels  and  is  gross 
upon  the  other  side.    Just  think  of  the  life  of  anj^  society 


92  JiSSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

in  the  midst  of  which  you  live,  and  then  think  if  you  could 
take  out  of  it  the  tendency  to  quarrel  and  the  tendency  to 
crawl,  the  tendency  to  separate  man  from  his  fellow-man 
and  the  tendency  to  bring  a  man  to  live  among^  his  lower 
passions,  his  lower  thoughts,  how  it  would  spring  up  full 
of  beauty  in  its  true  idea.  Now,  the  Christian  Church 
stands  in  the  midst  of  the  community,  continually  labor- 
ing for  these  two  things.  Do  not  tell  me  that  the  Chris- 
tian Church  has  again  and  again  set  herself  as  the  foe  of 
just  exactl}'  these  two  things.  Do  not  tell  me  that  again 
and  again  the  Christian  Church  has  been  the  very  mis- 
tress and  breeder  of  dissensions ;  that  again  and  again, 
with  her  superstitious  and  mercenar^^  theologies,  she  has 
degraded  the  life  of  man  instead  of  elevating  it.  No  man 
knows  that  better  than  the  Christian  minister  and  the 
student  of  Christian  history.  But  any  man  who  has 
given  attention  to  the  history  of  human  thought  knows 
that  the  noblest  and  the  sweetest  things  are  the  most 
capable  of  corruption,  and  that  everything  tends  to  cor- 
ruption just  in  the  opposite  way  from  that  in  which  its 
true  perfection  lies.  The  Christian  Church  has  again  and 
again  preached  and  practised  intolerance ;  the  Christian 
Church  has  again  and  again  made  herself  a  minister  of 
superstition  and  degradation  to  mankind ;  but  yet  it  re- 
mains true  that  in  the  essential  ideas  of  the  Christian 
Church,  and  also  in  the  great  progress  of  her  history 
through  all  her  career,  from  the  days  of  Jesus  to  these 
days  in  which  we  live,  her  great  total  tendencj^,  the  great 
sweep  of  her  influence,  taken  as  a  whole,  has  been  for  the 
brotherhood  of  mankind  and  for  the  lifting  of  the  human 
race  to  higher  plains  of  life.  It  must  be  so,  because  the 
great  idea  of  Christianity,  the  idea  which  Jesus  preached, 
nay,  the  idea  that  Jesus  was,  was  the  sonship  of  mankind 
to  God.  He  came  to  tell  that,  and  to^tell  it  not  simply 
in  any  gospel  that  He  preached,  but  to  tell  it  in  His  very 


THE    YOUNG   MEN'S   CHBISTIAN  ASSOCIATION.       93 

life,  in  the  deeper  presence  with  which  He  shone  with  the 
divine  Fatherhood  Himself — He  came  to  tell  iis  that  man 
was  the  son  of  God.  There  can  be  no  truth  which  shall 
ultimately  raise  humanity  to  its  true  height,  which  shall 
ultimately  make  every  man  know  every  other  man  as  his 
brother,  but  a  recognition  of  the  divine  Fatherhood  that 
is  over  us  all,  and  the  gathering  of  all  men  into  the  fam- 
ily of  God.  Christianity  again  and  again  has  wandered 
from  that  idea ;  she  has  preached  the  selection  of  a  few 
individuals  as  the  favorites  of  God ;  she  has  drawn  lines 
instead  of  rubbing  out  lines ;  she  has  bidden  men  make 
much  of  that  which  Christ,  our  Master,  made  very  little ; 
but  her  essential  ideas  and  her  great,  broad  tendencies 
are  all  in  the  direction  of  the  brotherhood  of  mankind 
under  the  Fatherhood  of  God,  who  stands  at  the  head 
of  the  great  family  in  which  we  all  abide.  You  must 
always  judge  of  a  man,  of  a  nation,  of  a  community,  of  the 
Church,  of  humanity  in  general,  not  by  special  charac- 
teristics that  have  belonged  to  it  in  any  particular  ages, 
because  every  man  and  every  institution  are  again  and 
again  false  to  themselves;  but  you  must  judge  of  them 
by  the  essential  ideas  which  are  involved  in  their  very  con- 
stitution, and  by  the  broad  tendencies  and  great  move- 
ments which  you  discern  in  them.  Many  and  many  a 
man  does  mean  things  who,  in  his  heart,  is  liberal,  and 
Avho,  in  the  long  drift  and. current  and  purpose  of  his  life, 
is  generous.  And  so  the  Christian  Church  stands  as  the 
representative  of  this  great  Fatherhood  of  God,  although 
it  has  again  and  again  disowned  some  men  out  of  the 
family,  and  drawn  its  lines  where  God  has  sent  it  to  rub 
out  lines  and  make  all  mankind  as  one. 

As  one  looks  around  the  world,  and  as  one  looks  around 
our  own  land  to-day,  he  sees  that  the  one  thing  we  need 
is  personal  character.  The  thing  we  need  in  high  places, 
the  thing  whose  absence  is  making  us  all  anxious  with 


94  ESSAYS  AND  ADDIiESSES. 

regard  to  the  progress  of  the  country  among  those  who 
hokl  the  reins  of  highest  power,  is  not  what  we  hold  to  be 
mistaken  ideas  with  regard  to  pohcies  of  government,  but 
it  is  the  absence  of  lofty  and  unselfish  character.  It  is 
the  absence  of  the  complete  consecration  of  man's  self 
to  tlie  public  good ;  it  is  the  willingness  of  men  to  bring 
their  personal  and  private  spites  into  spheres  whose  ele- 
vation ought  to  shame  such  things  into  absolute  death ; 
the  tendencies  of  men,  even  of  men  whom  the  nation  has 
put  in  very  high  places  indeed,  to  count  those  high  places 
their  privileges,  and  to  try  to  draw  from  them,  not  help 
from  humanity  and  the  community  over  which  they  rule, 
but  their  own  mean,  personal,  private  advantage.  If  there 
is  any  power  that  can  elevate  human  character ;  if  there 
is  any  power  which,  without  inspiring  men  with  a  super- 
natural knowledge  with  regard  to  policies  of  government, 
without  making  men  solve  all  at  once,  intuitively,  the  in- 
tricacies of  problems  of  legislation  with  which  they  are 
called  upon  to  deal,  without  making  men  see  instantly 
to  the  very  heart  of  every  matter ;  if  there  is  any  power 
which  could  permeate  to  the  very  bottom  of  our  commu- 
nity, which  would  make  men  unselfish  and  true — why,  the 
errors  of  men,  the  mistakes  men  might  make  in  their 
judgment,  would  not  be  an  obstacle  in  the  way  of  the 
progress  of  this  great  nation  in  the  work  which  God  has 
given  her  to  do.  They  would  make  jolts,  but  nothing 
more.  On  in  the  course  which  God  has  appointed  her  to 
run  she  would  go  to  her  true  results.  There  is  no  power 
that  man  has  ever  seen  that  can  abide ;  there  is  no  power 
of  which  man  has  ever  dreamed  that  can  regenerate  hu- 
man character  except  religion ;  and  till  the  Christian  relig- 
ion, which  is  the  religion,  of  this  laud — till  the  Christian 
religion  shall  have  so  far  regenerated  human  character  in 
this  land  that  multitudes  of  men  shall  act  under  its  high  im- 
pulses and  principles  so  that  the  men  who  are  not  inspired 
with  them  shall  be  shamed  at  least  into  an  outward  con- 


THE    YOUNG  MEN'S   CHRISTIAN  ASSOCIATION.       95 

formity  with  them,  there  is  iio  secimty  for  the  great,  final 
continuance  of  the  nation. 

It  is  these  powers,  then — it  is  these  powers  that  belong 
to  Christianity,  that  belong  to  the  Christian  Church :  the 
power,  in  the  fii'st  place,  of  making  human  life  safe,  or 
filling  it  with  the  highest  motives  and  setting  it  to  the 
liighest  work ;  the  power,  in  the  next  place,  of  harmoniz- 
ing dissensions  and  of  making  men  tolerant  of  one  an- 
other as  the  common  childi'cn  of  one  great  Father;  and 
the  power,  in  the  third  place,  of  elevating  the  whole  plane 
of  human  character,  so  that  men  shall  be  in  large  part,  and 
shall  at  least  pretend  to  be  throughout,  unselfish,  and  de- 
voted to  the  interests  of  theu'  fellow-men.  There  lies  the 
hope  of  this  community,  of  this  country,  of  the  world.  I 
am  speaking  of  Christianity ;  I  am  speaking  of  the  Chris- 
tian Church.  How  about  the  Young  Men's  Christian 
Association "?  Unless  this  association  be  the  simple  repre- 
sentation of  Christianity  among  us,  in  all  its  breadth  and 
length — unless  this  association,  however  it  may  be  specifi- 
cally organized,  has  a  large  tolerance  and  sympathy  for 
every  man  who  has  a  love  and  reverence  for  truth  and  is 
trying  to  be  a  servant  of  Jesus  Christ,  I  have  nothing  to 
do  with  it.  But  because  I  believe  it  has  that  broad  sj-m- 
pathy,  because  I  believe  that  it  is  ready,  with  its  pliable 
organization  and  with  its  large  life,  to  move  forward  as 
God  is  moving  the  whole  Christian  Church,  forward  to 
larger  thoughts  and  broader  sympathies,  therefore  I  am 
mth  it  heart  and  soul,  and  rejoice  in  ererything  that 
promises  for  it  yet  greater  work  and  yet  greater  prosper- 
ity in  the  future  than  it  has  in  the  past.  May  God  bless 
it — bless  it  with  a  deeper  consecration  to  His  will ;  bless 
it  with  a  larger  love  for  His  Son,  whom  to  love  is,  in 
the  simple,  literal  meaning  of  the  words,  everlasting  life ; 
bless  it  with  a  broader  and  yet  broader  sympathy  with 
every  work  that  any  man  in  the  name  of  Christ  is  doing 
to  make  the  world  better  and  to  glorify  God. 


LITURGICAL   GROWTH. 

(Address   at   the    Seventh   Congress   of  the   Protestant   Episcopal 
Church,  Providence,  E.  I.,  October  27,  1881.) 

I  THINK,  Mr.  President,  that  the  principle  npon  which 
we  have  based  onr  discnssion  this  evening-  is  this :  Every- 
thing- mnst  grow  in  its  own  sphere,  and  the  growth  of  any 
especial  thing  depends  upon  the  nature  of  that  thing.  It 
is  therefore  the  nature  of  the  Liturgy  which  must  deter- 
mine liturgical  growth. 

About  a  year  ago  I  had  the  opj^ortunity  of  attending 
service,  after  having  just  landed  in  England,  in  a  church  in 
Liverpool.  I  found  the  church  crowded  with  people,  and 
discovered,  what  my  American  ignorance  had  not  known 
before,  that  it  was  the  day  on  which  was  especially  cele- 
brated the  anniversary  of  the  coronation  of  the  Quefen. 
When  the  sermon  came,  the  venerable  clergyman  preached 
upon  the  growth  of  the  nation  diu-ing  the  forty  A-ears 
which  had  elapsed  since  the  Queen  came  to  the  throne. 
He  pointed  out  to  us  the  growth  of  England  in  political 
and  social  advantages,  in  commercial  wealth,  in  the  vari- 
ous arts  and  sciences,  and  by  and  by  he  came  to  that  which 
it  was  absolutely  necessary  he  should  preach  upon  in  a 
church — the  gi'owth  of  England  in  the  matter  of  religion ; 
and  he  told  us  that  it  might  be  supposed  from  a  great 
deal  we  had  read  in  the  newspapers  that  while  England 
had  grown  everywhere  else  and  in  everything  else,  she 
had  become  less  religious.  He  said  he  was  happy  to  assure 
us  that  that  was  not  the  case,  and  he  proceeded  to  give  us 

96 


LITURGICAL   GROWTH.  97 

the  reason  why  it  was  apparent  that  she  had  advanced  in 
religion,  as  well  as  in  every  other  great  interest  of  human 
life — namely,  that  whereas  forty  years  ago  the  black  gown 
was  used  in  many  pulpits,  it  was  now  almost  never  seen, 
but  the  sui'plice  had  taken  its  place ;  in  the  second  place, 
that  while  formerly  the  choral  service  was  considered  the 
especial  mark  of  a  peculiar  class,  it  was  now  almost  uni- 
versally used  in  English  churches.  On  these  grounds  the 
gentleman  asked  us  to  reassure  our  faith,  and  to  believe 
that  England  was  going,  not  backward,  but  forward,  in 
the  belief  and  practice  of  Christianity.  That  seemed  to 
be  a  very  parody  upon  the  whole  idea  of  liturgical  growth. 
One's  mind  went  l^ack  to  the  wondrous  progress  that  had 
been  made  in  Christian  thought  during  those  forty  years. 
One  thought  how  the  Christian  faith  had  put  itself  forth 
in  large  works  for  brother-man,  in  all  the  different  depart- 
ments of  his  need,  and  then  found  himself  brought  down 
to  believe  in  the  progress  of  Christianity,  not  because  of 
these  great  new  relations  of  the  human  mind  to  Christian 
truth,  but  because  the  black  gown  had  been  superseded 
by  the  surplice,  and  because  the  choral  service  had  taken 
the  place  of  the  plainer  ritual  of  those  earlier  days ! 

That  leads  us  prettj?-  much  to  our  idea,  of  which  I  began 
to  speak,  of  the  principle  upon  which  we  shall  judge  of 
liturgical  growth  at  all.  Liturgical  growth  is  not  growth 
in  the  amount  of  liturgy,  nor  is  it  an  increase  in  the  pre- 
dominance of  special  kinds  of  liturgy.  Liturgy — that  is, 
the  use  of  stated  forms  of  worship — has  its  assigned  pur- 
pose, and  by  that  alone  is  to  be  guided.  It  is  an  instru- 
ment, and  not  an  end.  It  is  a  means,  and  not  the  final 
purpose  to  which  the  means  is  directed.  And  any  growth 
in  the  adaptation  of  the  Liturgy  to  the"  uses  for  which  it 
is  designed — for  bringing  man's  mind  into  larger  contact 
with  truth,  man's  soul  into  deeper  love  for  the  Saviour, 
man's  will  into  more  complete  submission  to  the  will  of 


98  JESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

God — that  is  litui'gical  growth,  and  nothing  else  is.  That 
is  true  growth  of  litui'gy  in  the  Chiu'ch  of  Christ.  Litm'- 
gical  growth  may  be  of  all  sorts  and  kinds.  If  the  dimi- 
nution of  the  amount  of  liturgy  is  going  to  accomplish  this 
great  purpose,  then  its  dindnutiou  is  litm-gical  growth. 
If  liturgical  enrichment  is  to  accomplish  this  piu-pose, 
then  that  is  liturgical  growth.  If  the  flexibility,  the  open- 
ness, the  largeness  of  the  union  of  liturgical  principles 
with  the  other  great  principles  of  worship  is  going  to  ac- 
complish this  purpose,  then  the  larger  the  uuion  of  that 
idea  with  the  others  which  have  always  existed  among 
Christian  men  and  women,  the  greater  and  truer  is  litur- 
gical growth.  The  Liturgy  of  our  day  stands  somewhat 
in  the  grand  and  august  position  of  the  heir  of  some  great 
estate  in  some  European  country,  where  the  honors  and 
emoluments  which  belong  to  the  ancestors  come  down  to 
later  generations.  The  Liturgy  which  is  inherited  from 
the  far-off  ages  of  the  past  walks  among  the  men  of  its 
own  time  as  the  privileged  and  responsible  heir  of  all  the 
centuries.  He  walks  among  the  men  of  his  own  time  as 
one  who  has  received  a  precious  inheritance.  He  stands 
between  the  past  and  the  present ;  but  always  his  truest 
duty  is  toward  the  present,  and  not  toward  the  past.  His 
duty  is  to  bring  out  of  the  past  only  that  which  is  going 
to  be  of  real  use  and  value  right  here  in  the  present.  The 
sentiment  of  the  country  sweeps  away  instantly,  sooner  or 
later,  with  its  wise  indignation,  any  mere  inheritors  of  the 
past  who  accept  no  function  with  reference  to  the  present. 
But  the  sentiment  of  the  country,  however  democratic,  is 
ready  to  accept  any  representative  of  past  generations  and 
their  richness  which  accepts  as  its  only  function  the  duty 
it  has  to  perform  to  the  times  in  which  it  is  set  to  live. 
This  is  the  only  principle  we  can  possibly  apply  to  the 
problem  of  liturgical  growth. 

We  apply  this  more  especially  to  our  own  Church. 


LITURGICAL    GROWTH.  99 

What,  tlieu,  are  tlie  ways  in  which  liturgy,  or  inherited 
forms  of  worship,  fixed  and  stated,  which  have  come  to 
us  from  the  older  times,  do  become  of  larger  use  in  the 
present,  and  fulfil  the  conditions  which  our  own  times 
imperatively  demand?  Certainly  one  means  is  by  flexi- 
bility. One  means  is  by  openness  to  change.  It  seems 
to  me  that  when  we  have  once  fixed  such  an  idea'  of  what 
it  means,  there  can  be  no  question  as  to  the  continual 
power  of  the  Christian  Church  to  change  the  forms  which 
it  has  received  from  the  Christian  generations  which  have 
gone  before.  We  can  see  where  the  difficulty  comes,  and 
where  the  value  and  importance  of  absolute  fealty  to  htm*- 
gical  princij^les  applies  itself  to  liturgical  special  forms, 
and  methods  which  have  come  down  to  us  from  the  past. 
Oui'  dear  old  professor  down  at  Alexandria,  Dr.  Sparrow, 
used  to  have  a  special  question  with  which  he  used  to 
eom^ront  some  of  the  classes  that  came  under  his  tuition. 
His  question  was  this :  "  Are  positive  institutions  in  gen- 
eral as  purely  positive  as  particularly  positive  institu- 
tions?" The  "positive  institution  in  general"  has  in  re- 
ligion a  positiveness  which  does  not  belong  to  the  par- 
ticular positive  institution  in  which  it  is  for  a  little  time 
embodied. 

Therefore  it  is  that  we  are  to  rejoice  in  such  action  as 
was  taken  in  our  last  General  Convention  for  the  establish- 
ment of  a  commission  for  the  enrichment  of  our  Liturgy. 

I  do  -not  feel  so  deeply  as  my  dear  friend  who  intro- 
duced that  resolution  feels  the  value  of  the  results  which 
are  immediately  to  come  from  it.  But  I  feel  as  deeply  as 
he  the  desirableness  that  there  shoiild  be  established — and 
•  I  value  that  resolution  because  it  seems  to  me  to  establish 
— the  absolute  liberty  at  any  time  for  a  change  of  the  ser- 
vices, in  free  and  immediate  adaptation  to  the  conditions 
in  which  we  find  ourselves  placed  at  any  moment  of  the 
Church's  life.     Nothing  could  be  worse  than  to  have  set- 


100  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

tied  down  upon  onr  Prayer-book  the  palsy  of  changeless- 
ness.  I  should  almost  be  ready,  even  if  I  saw  no  possi- 
bility of  change  for  the  better — even  if  I  feared  change 
for  the  worse — to  change  for  the  purpose  of  establishing 
the  desii-ableness,  the  possibility,  of  the  liberty  of  change. 
I  do  not  believe  our  Liturgy  is  flexible  enough,  when,  in 
the  memory  of  those  who  have  been  in  our  Church  cer- 
tainly for  not  a  great  many  years,  there  have  been  a  large 
number  of  intelligent,  thoughtful,  conscientious,  faithful 
ministers  and  laymen  of  this  Church  who  have  left  our 
communion  and  established  a  communion  of  their  own, 
because  the  Church  in  which  they  lived  was  absolutely  un- 
willing to  allow  them  the  disuse  of  one  word  between  the 
covers  of  the  Prayer-book.  It  is  not  flexible  enough  so 
long  as  it  is  possible  for  such  a  thing  as  that  to  take 
place.  Do  you  say  that  the  Reformed  Episcopal  Church 
left  our  body  and  established  themselves  as  an  indepen- 
dent Church  for  other  reasons  as  well  ?  Grant  it.  I  do 
say,  however,  that  all  the  history  of  that  seceding  body 
bears  witness  to  the  very  strong  presumption,  amounting 
almost  to  a  certainty,  that  if  our  Church  had  met  them 
with  a  cordial  willingness  that  they  should  disuse  one 
word  in  one  service  of  the  Prayer-book,  and  say  that  they 
meant  by  that  disuse  a  doctrine  which  our  Church  by  no 
means  excommunicates  persons  for  believing,  but  which 
multitudes  of  us  hold,  feeling  that  it  can  be  comprehended 
within  the  use  of  this  word,  and  stand  unchallenged,  they 
would  have  continued  in  membership  with  us  to  this  day. 
And  so  long  as  that  state  of  things  exists — a  circum- 
stance unexamiDled  in  ecclesiastical  history — our  Church 
is  stamped  with  the  stigma  of  inflexibility,  and  is  unde- 
serving of  the  great  claims  which  are  constantly  put  forth 
in  its  behalf. 

The  other  point  with  regard  to  the  true  principle  of 
liturgical  growth  is  this :  that  the  principle  of  liturgism, 


LITURGICAL    GROWTH.  101 

the  use  of  stated  and  appointed  forms,  can  never  be  able 
to  do  tlie  full  work  of  the  Church  of  Christ  unless  it  be 
in  sympathy  with  the  larger,  fuller,  freei',  more  extem- 
poraneoas  forms  of  worship  Avhich  belong  in  the  hearts 
and  souls  of  men.  I  do  not  believe  that,  whatever  use  we 
make  of  the  Liturgy,  and  however  much  our  souls  may 
be  wrapped  up  in  the  beauty  of  the  liturgical  principle,  it 
is  possible  for  us  to  do  it  justice  unless  we  put  it  in  union 
with  larger  and  freer  methods  of  worshij),  and  let  it  call 
them  into  its  service.  Just  exactly  as  authority  never  did 
its  full  work  unless  it  was  in  continual  relation  to  the 
freedom  and  the  willing  obedience  of  those  over  whom  it 
ruled  ;  just  as  organization,  while  it  is  the  great  power  by 
which  society  lives,  only  lives  as  it  continually  welcomes 
to  its  aid  spontaneity;  so  the  liturgical  principle  is  never 
going  to  do  (done  the  great  work  of  ministering  completely 
to  the  use  of  all  kinds  of  men  under  all  sorts  of  circum- 
stances. It  has  shown,  again  and  again,  its  weakness  and 
incapacity,  and  put  the  Chui-eh  into  a  position  in  which 
it  ought  not  to  have  been  put  before  the  great  world  of 
reasoning  men. 

When,  some  ten  years  ago,  the  great  city  of  Chicago 
was  in  flames,  and  the  news  came  to  the  General  Conven- 
tion of  our  Church,  then  holding  its  triennial  session,  that 
this  dreadful  calamity  was  transpiring,  moved  by  a  pro- 
found sense  of  the  impotency  of  human  help,  and  by  that 
spirit  of  supplication  for  divine  interposition  which  pre- 
vailed through  all  our  land,  our  Houses  of  Convention 
voted  that  they  would  suspend  their  work  and  go  to 
prayer.  What  did  they  do  ?  They  knelt  down  together 
and  read  the  Litany !  It  does  seem  to  me  that  in  tlie 
minds  of  the  people  who  looked  at  that  scene,  tlie  fact  of 
their  feeling  compelled  to  resort  to  the  use  of  this  stated 
form  must  have  ax)peared  in  the  light  of  a  certain  sign  of 
bondage — that  a  Church,  when  called  upon  to  pray  for  a 


102  ESSAYS  AND  ADDllESSES. 

burning  city,  should  have  considered  it  necessary  to  use  a 
form  of  prayer  in  which  ahnost  everv  other  kind  of  hu- 
man woe  is  laid  before  God  except  the  woe  of  a  burning 
town.  It  goes  straight  in  the  face  of  the  common  sense 
of  mankind ;  and  however  j'ou  and  I,  familiar  with  the 
thought  embodied  in  the  forms  ecclesiastically  provided, 
are  able  to  put  ourselves  in  sympathy  with  the  spirit  and 
intention  which  may  underlie  the  words  of  the  prayers 
which  are  appointed  to  be  used,  no  Church  is  ready  to 
present  itself  before  the  country  and  ask  the  people  to 
accept  its  methods  of  worshij)  so  long  as  that  picture 
which  I  have  placed  before  you  stands  upon  its  historic 
]3agc.  And  if  the  same  thing  were  to  occur  again  to-day, 
our  Church  has  no  other  picture  to  paint  upon  the  pages 
of  the  present.  When  the  story  of  our  President's  sick- 
ness, and  afterward  the  ncAvs  of  his  death,  crossed  the 
ocean  the  other  day,  and  excited  that  wonderful  sympathy 
there  which  has  been  so  often  referred  to,  even  the  inflexi- 
bility of  the  English  Church  had  to  break  away  from  its 
conventionalities,  and,  somewhere  or  other,  crowd  into 
its  services  some  sort  of  a  form  of  prayer  specially  adapted 
to  the  exigency  of  the  hour.  They  had  to  pray  for  Presi- 
dent Garfield  ;  and  it  was  necessary  to  place  a  new  prayer 
in  the  English  Litiu'gy,  in  order  that  our  country  and  its 
stricken  President  might  be  prayed  for  in  England.  If  to- 
morrow the  sad  news  came  to  us  that  England's  Queen 
was  seriously  ill,  and  that  the  great  sorrow  which  so  re- 
cently came  to  our  land  was  in  any  way  threatening  that 
dear  mother-land,  we  have  got  to  violate  the  j)rinciples  of 
our  Church  and  the  genius  of  the  liturgical  principle,  in 
the  absoluteness  with  which  it  is  forced  continually  upon 
us,  before  we  could  offer  up  our  prayers  for  the  honored 
sovereign  of  that  beloved  nation. 

Now,  my  friends,  it  does  seem  that  all  such  absolute 
and  required  use  of  set  forms  of  prayer  is  a  simple  proof 


LITURGICAL    GROWTH.  103 

of  a  lack  of  faitli  in  the  Liturgy.  It  seems  to  me  that 
there  is  something  strange  in  this.  We  believe,  and  de- 
clare our  belief,  in  every  way,  before  the  world,  that 
the  litiu'gical  method  of  worship,  in  the  glowing  forms 
which  have  come  down  from  the  past,  ha\dng  the  sub- 
lime authority  of  all  the  Christian  ages  for  its  sanction, 
is  something  which,  by  its  intrinsic  excellence,  so  re- 
commends itself  to  all  people  that  if  they  once  use 
that  they  will  never  want  to  use  anything  else.  We 
embody  those  forms  in  our  Book  of  Conmion  Prayer, 
and  then  we  go  to  work  and  guard  our  clergy,  who  are 
supposed  to  be  in  the  heart  of  the  fascination  of  that 
Prayer-book,  with  all  sorts  of  rules  and  prohibitions,  lest 
perchance  they  should  go  out  of  this  sheepfold,  in  wliich 
we  believe  it  is  the  passion  of  the  whole  world  to  keep 
itself.  It  shows  a  lack  of  faith  in  our  own  Prayer-book, 
or  we  could  trust  to  its  intrinsic  excellence,  without  put- 
ting prohibitions  around  it.  It  argues  a  lack  of  faith  in 
the  men  whom  we  have  ordfdned,  and  "whom,  in  welcom- 
ing them  into  the  communion  of  our  Church,  we  believe 
to  be  full  of  the  spirit  of  that  Liturgy.  Certainly,  when 
our  Church  stands  before  the  world  and  makes  the  great, 
grand  claims  that  it  is  making  all  the  time — that  it  has 
opened  its  gates  so  ^^dde  that  any  Christian  man  who 
wants  to  come  in  and  worship  may  do  so ;  that  it  offers 
the  only  methods  by  which  this  Christian  land,  if  it  woidd 
come  into  our  communion,  might  live  and  worship  as  one 
united  Christian  nation — it  is  absolutely  impossible  that 
it  shall  consistently  claim  that,  so  long  as  more  and  more, 
by  stricter  and  stricter  prohibitions,  it  rules  out  one  of 
the  eternal  forms  in  which  the  human  soul,  not  simply 
in  its  privacy,  but  in  the  company  of  those  of  kindi'ed 
purpose,  will  approach  its  God.  The  aspirations  of  our 
Church  are  to  the  habits  of  our  Church  like  the  old  oak 
to  the  flower-pot.      The  aspirations  are  too  big  for  the 


104  i:SSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

habits  in  whicli  tliey  are  now  trying  to  live.  Sooner  or 
later  the  aspirations  have  got  to  break  the  halnt,  or  the 
habit  will  stifle  the  aspirations.  The  fiower-pot  has  got 
to  break  nuder  the  pressm*e  of  the  growing  oak,  or  the 
growing  oak  has  got  to  die,  or  else  live  perpetually  stunted 
within  the  j^oor  flower-pot  which  it  values  more  than  its 
own  life. 

I  believe  in  ritual  with  all  my  heart.  I  beheve  in  ritual 
just  exactly  as  the  artist  believes  in  and  uses  his  art.  I 
am  a  Ritualist,  and  I  am  unwilling  to  give  so  good  a 
name  to  any  sect  or  party  in  our  Church.  I  am  a  Ritual- 
ist, and  just  because  I  am  a  Rituahst,  and  because  I  be- 
lieve that  we  have  the  noblest  Ritual,  I  wish  to  see  that 
Ritual  become  most  effective  in  commending  itself  to  the 
hearts  of  all  men ;  I  am  willing  to  trust  that  Ritual  in 
largest  union  with  all  the  devotional  usages  of  men  about 
us,  because  I  believe  it  has  a  persuasive  power,  which  will 
attach  to  itself  the  extemporaneous  worship  of  those  who 
have  once  been  brought  under  its  influence,  and  will  make 
it  a  loftier  thing  than  it  has  been  ordinarih'  among  those 
who  have  liad  no  such  influence  as  liturgical  worship  to 
shed  upon  it.  Therefore  I  state  earnestly  my  behef  that 
one  of  the  great  necessities  for  the  growth  of  the  Litm-gy 
in  our  communion  is  the  breaking  in  upon  the  exclusive- 
ness  of  set  forms  of  worship,  and  the  giving  of  large  free- 
dom and  liberty  to  laity  and  clergymen,  bishops,  priests, 
and  deacons,  when  the  occasion  calls  for  it  and  their  souls 
move  them,  to  go  to  God,  in  their  churches,  at  their  altars, 
at  their  prayer-desks,  and  pour  out  their  supplications  to 
the  Almighty  Being  for  the  very  tilings  they  need,  instead 
of  being  compelled  to  go  in  some  roundabout  way  and 
pray  for  a  thousand  other  things,  and  trust  Omniscience 
to  know  the  thing  that  is  in  then*  hearts. 


AUTHORITY  A^D   CONSCIENCE. 

(Ninth  Congress  of  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  Detroit,  Mich., 
October  7,  1884.) 

In  tlie  Appendix  to  the  "  Apologia "  Cardinal  Newman 
writes  thus  of  the  Church  of  Rome  and  the  Church  of 
England :  "  Then  I  recognized  at  once  a  reality  which  was 
quite  a  new  thing  with  me.  Then  I  was  sensible  that  I 
was  not  making  for  myself  a  Church  by  an  effort  of 
thought.  I  needed  not  to  make  an  act  of  faith  in  Her. 
...  I  looked  at  Her — at  her  rites,  her  ceremonial,  and 
her  precejyts;  and  I  said,  This  is  a  religion;  and  then, 
when  I  looked  back  upon  the  poor  Anglican  Church,  for 
which  I  had  labored  so  hard,  and  upon  all  that  appertained 
to  it,  and  thought  of  our  various  attempts  to  dress  it  up, 
doctrinally  and  estheticaUy,  it  seemed  to  me  the  veriest 
of  nonentities.  Vanity  of  vanities,  all  is  vanity  !  "  They 
are  earnest  and  pathetic  words.  And  they  are  words 
which  never  could  have  been  written  by  any  man  except 
one  who  judged  a  church  wholly  by  the  standard  of  mitlior- 
itij.  They  mean  that  he  who  has  been  seeking  for  a 
Church  has  sought  a  body  clothed  with  tlie  power  of  in- 
fallibly declaring  what  is  true.  It  is  not  strange  that  to 
one  who  so  sought  a  Church,  the  Chm-cli  of  England  must 
have  seemed  a  very  nonentity.  The  only  wonder  is  that 
to  a  man  seeking  with  such  a  definition  in  his  mind  any 
religious  body  in  the  world  should  have  seemed  to  really 
be  a  Church. 

The  words  of  Newman  bring  us  face  to  face  with  the 

105 


106  ESSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

gist  of  the  whole  matter,  which  I  state  at  once  as  it  ap- 
pears to  me.  AngHcau  Protestantism,  attempting  to  rival 
Rome  on  her  own  groimd,  to  do  for  the  world  what  Rome 
claims  to  do,  to  live  by  the  method  of  authority,  must 
always  be  a  nonentity,  a  failure. 

Aughcan  Protestantism,  attempting  to  do  another  thing, 
to  treat  the  soul  in  another  way,  to  pro\dde  for  the  world 
another  ciUtm-e,  to  educate  and  appeal  to  the  human  con- 
science, has  before  her  the  power  of  mimense  usefulness 
and  power.  We,  who  cannot  with  Newman  choose  the 
Church  of  Rome,  may  say  either  of  two  things :  we  may 
deny  her  claim  of  inf aUibihty  and  look  elsewhere  for  what 
we  cannot  find  in  lier ;  or,  taking  broader  ground,  we  may 
maintain  that  it  is  not  of  the  nature  of  a  Church  to  be  an 
infallible  oracle  of  truth  at  all ;  that  such  an  oracle  does 
not  exist  on  earth;  that  Christ  did  not  mean  it  shoidd 
exist ;  that  the  true  notion  of  a  Chui-ch  is  of  a  home  for 
struggling  men,  aU  seeking  truth  together,  each  helping 
all  the  rest,  the  past  teaching  the  present,  the  j)resent 
correcting  the  errors  and  adding  to  the  wisdom  of  the 
past,  all  aided  in  the  search  by  one  great  Spirit,  all  loyal 
to  one  Master,  whom  to  know  is  everlasting  hfe,  but  whom 
not  one,  not  aU,  have  yet  known  perfectly,  and  each  ac- 
cepting what  truth  he  comes  to  accejDt  on  the  appro^'al 
of  his  own  conscience  given  to  the  evidence  which  it  has 
offered  to  his  mind  and  heart.  He  who  maintains  that 
the  Church  is  this  opens  at  once  the  question  of  authority 
and  conscience. 

We  begin  mtli  this,  that  behind  all  man's  knowledge 
of  truth  must  always  he  truth  itself,  perfect  in  its  own 
completeness  and  known  perfectly  to  God.  There  are 
three  pictures  of  the  way  in  which  that  truth  might  be 
attained  by  man.  The  first  is  by  an  infallible  oracle 
estabhshed  as  God's  mouthpiece  on  the  earth.  The  second 
is  by  the  individual  search  of  every  single  mind  working 


AUTROEITY  AND    CONSCIENCE.  107 

absolutely  by  itself.  The  thii'd  is  by  each  mind  working 
conscientionsly,  yet  always  using  the  experience  of  other 
minds,  past  and  present ;  always  working  and  living  as 
part  of  a  great  whole,  yet  always  finding  the  ultimate 
sanction  of  every  truth  for  it  nowhere  short  of  its  own 
intelligent  assent.  I  am  speaking  solely  of  the  religious 
search  for  truth,  and  therefore,  of  course,  in  either  of  the 
three  methods  God  is  the  som^ce  of  truth,  and  all  truth 
can  come  only  from  Him  to  man.  But  I  assume  also  that 
God  at  no  moment  withholds  any  truth  from  any  man 
who  is  in  the  position  and  condition  to  receive  it. 

Of  these  three  methods  Rome  frankly  and  cordially  pro- 
claims the  first,  and  clearly  enough  she  designates  where 
the  oracle  is  to  which  the  truth-seeker  must  go  to  find 
infallil)ility.  Almost  all  the  Christianit^y  which  has  re- 
jected Rome  has  still  been  haunted  by  the  si:)ecter  of  in- 
fallibility, and  a  large  part  of  it  has  very  gradually  come 
— much  of  it  is  very  far  from  coming  yet — to  see  that  the 
whole  conception  of  an  infaUible  and  oracular  utterance 
of  God  upon  the  earth  is  neither  necessary  for  the  salva- 
tion of  manldnd,  nor  in  harmony  with  the  genius  and 
spiiit  of  the  Christian  gospel,  nor  sustained  by  the  expe- 
rience of  man.  The  general  body  of  Protestants  tried  to 
find  infallibility  in  the  Bil)le  until  criticism  said  to  them, 
in  tones  that  they  could  not  mistake,  ''It  is  not  there." 
The  Anglican  Protestant  made  more  of  an  infallible 
Church,  till  the  increasing  earnestness  of  an  age  which 
bred  such  men  as  Newman  forced  to  her  consciousness  the 
fact  that  if  the  Church  of  England  were  an  oracle  at  all, 
she  was  an  oracle  without  a  mouth,  that  no  aj)paratus  of 
liturgical  exactness  or  deliberative  synods  coidd  supply 
her  with  that  which  she  had  not  by  nature — a  tongue  to 
utter  the  truth  which  all  men  are  to  accept  as  true. 

Most  natural  is  this  craving  for  infallible  and  complete 
knowledge  resting  on  indisputable  authority.    Our  Lord's 


108  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

disciples  sought  it  of  our  Lord,  and  could  not  believe  tliat 
in  Him  who  said,  "  I  am  the  Truth,"  all  truth  was  not  con- 
sciously and  completely  held.  But  Jesus  did  all  that 
words  coidd  do  to  set  them  right.  "  Of  that  day  and  that 
hour  knoweth  .  .  .  not  the  Son  but  the  Father,"  He  re- 
plied, as  if  He  would  distinctly  say  that  the  power  of 
l^erfect  knowledge  was  not  necessary  for  the  perfect  man. 
What  then  ?  It  surely  cannot  be  necessary  for  the  perfect 
Chiu'ch. 

Let  this  idea,  that  somewhere  on  the  earth  there  is  to- 
day a  being  or  a  possible  group  of  beings  which  otherwise 
than  by  the  great  methods  of  devout  thought  and  study 
and  experience  may  come  to  and  possess  the  knowledge 
of  truth,  of  such  truth,  for  instance,  as  the  character  of 
the  Bible,  or  the  destiny  of  man,  or  the  true  method  of 
the  conduct  and  organization  of  the  Church — let  such  an 
idea  as  that,  I  say,  be  lifted  absolutely  from  the  minds  of 
Christian  men ;  let  the  whole  idea  of  Church  authority 
save  as  the  contribution  of  material  which  is  to  be  freely 
criticized  and  used  by  the  conscience  and  intelligence  of 
men  be  swept  away  and  disappear,  and  think  what  vast 
gain  of  vigor  and  reality  and  so  of  light  must  come  !  Just 
see  what  some  of  the  gains  must  be. 

1.  The  notion  that  alisolutely  identical  belief  is  essential 
to  identity  of  Christian  faith  and  life  must  be  dissipated, 
and  the  community  of  many  men  of  many  minds  must 
shape  itself  in  actual  existence,  as  it  now  hovers  before 
the  dreams  of  men  dissatisfied  with  sects  and  schisms. 
Into  that  notion  of  the  need  or  the  possibihty  of  identical 
belief  many  waves  of  influence  have  been  eating  their  way 
for  years.  But  that  notion  must  be  shaken  from  its 
foundation  once  for  all  as  soon  as  the  dogma  of  infalli- 
bility is  broken  down.  In  proportion  as  the  search  for  a 
seat  of  infallibility  occupies  the  attention  of  a  Church,  the 
oneness  of  many  men  of  many  minds  must  grow  weak 


AUTROEITY  AND    COXSCIEXCE.  109 

within  her.  A  Church  bound  to  the  doctrine  of  authority 
cannot  be  a  comprehensive  Church.  A  Church  conscious 
of  infallibility  could  have  no  Church  Congress. 

2.  Again,  the  Chiu-ch  freed  from  the  dogma  of  infalli- 
bility— and  I  hold  that  the  dogma  of  authority  is  mean- 
ingless unless  it  involves  a  practical  infallibility — would 
enter  upon  the  culture  of  personal  character  which  be- 
longs to  freedom,  and  to  freedom  only.  "Wliat  shall  I 
believe  regarding  this  truth  ? "  "  How  shall  we  organize 
this  institution  and  conduct  this  rite  ? "  The  answer  to 
those  questions  I  must  seek  either  in  old  authorities  which 
have  settled  them  long  ago  past  all  appeal,  or  I  must  seek 
them  in  my  own  present  intelligence  used  at  its  best  and 
freest.  If  I  seek  it  in  the  first  way,  I  exercise  my  power 
of  antiquarian  research  and  my  power  of  submission.  If 
I  seek  it  in  the  second  way,  I  exercise  my  conscience  and 
my  will,  my  prudence,  my  charity,  my  honor  for  the  past, 
my  greater  honor  for  the  future,  my  honesty,  my  fairness, 
in  a  word,  my  character,  and  my  humanity,  and  that  is 
better. 

You  see  it  is  not  a  question  of  what  truth  a  man  shall 
hold,  but  of  Iww  a  man  shall  hold  all  truth.  Greater  than 
my  holding  this  truth  or  that,  is  the  way  in  which  all  truth 
is  held  by  me.  The  one  way  of  holding  truth,  if  it  were 
perfect!}^  successful,  ends  in  acquisition,  and  the  other  way 
makes  character.  And  because  directness  and  simplicity 
are  not  merely  noble  parts,  but  also  powerful  means  of 
character,  I  say,  in  the  third  place,  that  because  those 
qualities  would  be  set  free  hy  the  disenchantment  of  the 
Christian  mind  from  the  notion  of  infallibility,  therefore 
such  a  disenchantment  would  be  great  gain.  What  tor- 
tuous sophistries,  what  reasoning  in  circles,  what  following 
out  of  hopeless  lines,  this  search  after  the  seat  of  infal- 
hbihty  has  involved !  Universalit}'',  antiquity,  consent. 
These  are  the  notes  of  truth,  said  Vincentius  of  Lerins. 


110  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

Quod  semper,  quod  iihique,  qnod  ah  omnibus.  How  often 
we  have  heard  it !  I  confess  that  nutil  very  lately  I  had 
never  read  through  the  "  Comnioiiitoriuni "  of  the  monk 
of  Gaul.  I  doubt  if  many  who  are  strongest  and  loudest 
for  the  Vineentian  Canon  have  ever  read  it  yet.  I  venture 
to  commend  it  to  their  reading,  for  it  is  very  eloquent  and 
clever.  But  it  is  most  of  all  noteworthy  for  the  magnifi- 
cent unconsciousness  and  constancy  with  which  it  travels 
in  a  circle  and  Avitli  which  it  begs  the  question.  There 
arc  not  many  books  which  can  surpass  it  in  these  points. 
A  universality  which  fixes  its  own  limits  of  space,  an  an- 
tiquity which  decides  for  itself  just  at  what  point  in  his- 
tory the  development  of  truth  must  stop,  and  a  consent 
which  expressh'  announces  that  it  is  limited  to  those  who 
were  '•  suis  quisque  temporilms  et  locis  in  imitate  comimmionis 
et  fidei  2)ermauentes"  these,  surely,  while  they  may  confirm 
the  believer  who  wants  to  be  confirmed  in  his  comfortable 
faith,  can  have  little  to  say  to  a  critical  and  unbelieving 
world,  can  bring  no  assurance  to  an  honest  and  perplexed 
inquirer. 

And  yet  to  such  straits  as  these  of  old  Vincentius  are 
all  men  reduced  who,  not  acknowledging  the  localized 
infallibility  of  Rome,  search  elsewhere  for  an  absolute 
authority  in  tlie  Church  of  Christ.  One  of  om*  o^vn  bish- 
ops hunts  it  through  a  course  of  lectures  to  young  stu- 
dents of  theology,  and,  convinced  that  it  is  not  in  the 
pope,  nor  in  the  councils,  nor  in  the  episcopate,  finds  it 
filially  in  the  '' ecmnenical  mind,"  which  is  the  Vineentian 
Canon  over  again,  and  which  can  by  no  possibility  make 
itself  known  except  b}^  an  atmospheric  influence  or  by  a 
show  of  hands.  Another  of  our  own  bishops,  in  an  amaz- 
ing letter,  declares  that  the  practical  infallibility  lies  in 
the  present  English  translation  of  the  Bible,  no  word  of 
which,  he  says,  "  can  be  touched  either  by  criticism  or  by 
skepticism  without  disloyalty  to  the  Church,  danger  to 


AUTHORITY  AXD    COXSCIEXCE.  Ill 

the  tnitli,  and  liai-in  to  souls,"  not  even  if  the  touch  he 
dreads  be  simply  put  forth  to  remove  from  the  New  Tes- 
tament a  text  of  whose  spuriousness  there  is  not  a  shadow 
of  reasonable  doubt. 

Ah,  no ;  any  dogma  of  infallibility  resident  in  the 
Chm-ch,  upon  which  some  people  would  reh'  for  the 
Church's  motive  power,  is  too  heavy  a  load  for  the 
Church  to  carry.  It  is  like  the  old  trouble  in  managing 
balloons  which  has  never  yet  been  conquered.  The  ma- 
chinery with  which  men  have  tried  to  proj)el  and  steer  the 
balloon  has  always  proved  so  heav}'  that  it  has  brought 
the  Avhole  thing  tuml)ling  to  the  ground.  Let  us  leave 
infallibility  to  the  Church  newspaper,  where  it  belongs. 
The  Church  nuist  know  that  God  treats  error  in  this 
world  just  as  He  treats  poverty.  He  sweeps  it  off  by  no 
one  fiat  of  omnipotence.  He  knows  that  some  day  it 
must  go.  It  has  the  seeds  of  its  death  in  itself.  He  bids 
men  fight  with  it  and  kill  it.  He  gives  them  the  perpetual 
help  of  His  Spirit  of  Light.  But  as  He  has  opened  no 
stream  of  flowing  gold  where  poverty  may  go  and  gather 
an  instantaneous  supply  for  every  need,  so  He  has  estab- 
lished no  oracle  of  indisputable  truth  where  ignorance 
may  find  at  once  an  unerring  answer  to  every  question. 
Tlirough  the  ever  more  skilful  use  of  the  natural  powers 
which  God  has  given  him — a  use  always  seeking  and 
always  receiving  the  inspiration  of  God's  present  Spirit — 
so  in  the  midst  of  all  sorts  of  doubts  and  blunders  man 
must  struggle  on  to  the  final  victory  alike  over  poverty 
and  over  error. 

And  if  we  lay  aside — not  sadly  and  reluctantly,  but 
gladly  and  as  getting  rid  of  an  incumbrance — if  so  we 
lay  aside  the  notion  of  infallible  authority,  then  what  re- 
mains"? I  answer,  Individualism.  Let  us  not  fear  that 
name  of  which  some  people  have  such  terror.  Let  us  not 
fear  the  thing  which  that  name  represents.     Individual- 


112  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

ism  is  the  assertion  of  the  personal  life,  with  its  rights,  its 
responsibilities,  and  its  needs,  as  the  central  object  of  the 
final  pnrpose  of  the  world.  The  religion  of  the  Son  of 
Man  cannot,  must  not  ignore  or  be  afraid  of  that.  There 
are  many  units,  but  the  unit  of  hundreds  and  the  unit  of 
tens  are  built  out  of  and  exist  for  the  unit  of  the  one. 
It  can  live  without  them,  but  they  cannot  live  without  it. 
The  old  Rome  forgot  the  jjersonal  life  in  government. 
The  new  Rome  has  forgotten  it  in  rehgion,  and  we  know 
the  mischief  and  the  sufferings  of  both.  There  is  no 
hope  for  the  world  but  in  a  healthy  individuahsm.  And 
individualism  in  matters  of  thought  means  private  judg- 
ment. 

Private  judgment ;  that  is  another  word  of  which  we 
must  not  be  afraid.  It  may  help  us  not  to  be  afraid  of  it 
if  we  ask  ourselves  whether  there  is  really  any  such  thing 
as  judgment  which  is  not  private.  I  know  of  no  such 
thing.  The  man  who  chooses  the  authority  to  which  he 
will  unhesitatingl}^  submit  must  choose  by  private  judg- 
ment if  his  act  is  to  have  any  reality  and  power.  The 
Church  invites  me  to  the  most  stupendous  act  of  private 
judgment  when  she  bids  me  allow  her  claim  to  infallibil- 
ity. Probably  the  most  impressive  and  influential  act  of 
private  judgment  about  religious  things  which  has  taken 
place  in  all  this  century  was  the  decision  which  took  John 
Henry  Newman  to  the  Church  of  Rome. 

But  just  here  comes  in  all  that  is  true — and  that  is  very 
much — in  the  current  laudations  of  authority  and  depre- 
cations of  individualism.  The  individual  does  not  stand 
alone.  Backed  by  the  past,  surrounded  b}^  the  present, 
with  the  world  beside  him,  nay,  with  the  world,  in  the 
great  old  Bible  phrase,  "  set  in  his  heart,"  it  is  his  right, 
his  (h\tj,  his  necessity,  to  feed  himself  out  of  all,  while 
yet  to  his  own  personal  conscience  must  come  the  final 
test.     His  true  individualism  is  not  the  individualism  of 


AUTHORITY  AND    CONSCIENCE.  113 

Robinson  Crusoe,  but  the  individualism  of  St.  Paul.  Here 
is  the  difference  between  the  second  and  the  third  of  the 
methods  of  attaining  truth  of  which  I  spoke.  To  use 
authority /or  evidence;  to  feel  the  power  of  reverend  beauty 
which  belongs  to  ancient  goodness ;  to  distrust  ourselves 
long  when  we  differ  from  the  wisest  and  the  best ;  to  know 
that  the  whole  truth  can  and  must  come,  not  to  the  one 
man,  but  to  the  whole  of  humanity ;  and  to  listen  to  that 
whole  as  it  groans  and  travails  with  its  yet  unmastered 
truth — to  do  all  this  and  yet  to  let  ourselves  call  no  con- 
viction ours  till  our  own  mind  and  conscience  has  accepted 
it  as  true — that  which  is  really  the  great  human  truth 
after  which  the  theories  of  Church  authority  are  search- 
ing— that  is  the  genuine  relation,  I  take  it,  of  the  eon- 
science  to  authority.  And  that  has  nothing  in  it  of  the 
spirit  of  slavishness  or  death. 

It  ought  to  be  remembered  that  the  subjects  to  which 
authority  may  be  applied  are  various,  and  that  to  each 
of  them  it  must  apply  different^.  In  general  the  subjects 
of  authority  are  three — facts,  dogmas,  and  rites.  Let  us 
look  at  each  a  moment. 

1.  Facts  must  be  taken  on  authority.  The  story  of  the 
Gospels,  the  acts  which  Jesus  did,  the  words  which  Jesus 
said — these  must  be  taken  on  the  word  of  those  who  saw 
and  heard  them  first,  and  of  the  men  who  heard  them 
from  their  fathers  age  after  age.  That  is  the  Avitness  of 
the  Churcli.  That  is  the  testimony  of  history.  Wliere  is 
the  duty  of  the  private  judgment  there  f  Clearly  enough, 
it  is  in  the  free  use  of  criticism.  The  authenticity  of  rec- 
ords, the  possibility  of  mistake,  the  intrusion  of  prejudice, 
tlie  partialness  of  view — these  are  the  fields  for  conscien- 
tious labor.  The  man  who  seeks  to  do  it  for  himself 
ought  to  be  encouraged.  The  man  who  helps  his  breth- 
ren to  do  it,  or  who  tries  to  give  them  the  results  which 
it  has  reached,  ought  not  to  be  blamed  or  silenced  by 


114  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

public  opinion  or  by  bishop,  however  what  we  choose  to 
call  the  peace  of  a  congregation  may  be  disturbed. 

2.  And  as  to  dogmas — what  are  they  ?  A  dogma  I  take 
to  be  a  truth  packed  for  transportation.  As  the  primitive 
man  gathers  the  rich  living  fruit  in  some  tropical  forest, 
and  it  is  dried  and  packed  away  and  put  on  board  the 
ship  and  sent  half  around  the  world,  and  then  unshipped, 
unpacked,  and  its  infolded  life  made  once  more  live  and 
active  as  it  becomes  food  or  medicine  for  living  men  of 
far  more  complicated  lives  and  needs  than  they  had  who 
gathered  it ;  so  truth  is  gathered  and  compressed  in  dog- 
ma, but  the  dogma  must  be  opened  into  truth  again,  and 
unfold  its  native  life  in  richer  forms  of  power  before  it 
can  be  either  spiritual  medicine  or  spiritual  food.  Author- 
ity is  the  ship  in  which  the  dogma  sails.  I  get  my  dogma 
from  authority  as  I  get  my  package  from  the  ship.  But 
it  is  the  soul,  the  conscience,  which  turns  the  dogma  back 
again  to  truth.  No  soul  can  feed  on  dogma,  as  no  man 
can  eat  the  package  which  is  landed  on  the  wharf.  Au- 
thority VLVdiy  bring  Avhat  dogma  has  been  given  it  to  bring. 
Only  the  dogma  which  can  be  opened  into  truth  can  live. 
Only  the  truth  which  the  soul  appropriates  gives  life. 
Authority  is  responsible  for  safe  packing  and  safe  trans- 
portation, but  the  real  living  part  of  the  process  is  when, 
after  the  unpacking  has  taken  place,  the  conscience  tries 
to  turn  the  dogma  which  it  has  received  back  again  into 
truth. 

3.  And  what  shall  we  say  about  rites  and  ceremonies "? 
The  final  warrant  of  any  rite  or  ceremony  must  be  in  its 
joerceived  utility.  The  two  great  rites  which  are  alone 
essential  to  the  Christian  Church,  the  sacraments  of  Baj)- 
tism  and  the  Lord's  Supper,  coming  with  the  most  august 
authority,  that  of  our  Lord  Himself,  could  ihey  have  been 
what  they  are  to-day  to  thousands  of  souls,  even  with  the 
command  of  Christ  behind  them,  if  they  had  rested  all 


AUTHOEITT  AND    CONSCIENCE.  115 

these  centuries  solely  upon  the  great  foundation  of  the 
Lord's  commandment,  and  had  not  entered  into  living 
association  and  witness  of  themselves  to  millions  of  souls 
which  have  found  in  them  strength  and  grace  and  growth  f 
It  is  needless  to  ask  whetlier  the  soul  ought  to  keep  them 
solely  on  the  authority  of  Christ's  command,  even  with  no 
perception  of  their  utility.  He  who  made  the  sacraments 
made  them  such  that  they  must  help  the  souls  which  use 
them  rightly.  But  two  things  we  certainly  may  say :  fli'st, 
that  the  perpetual  demand  of  souls  for  the  witness  of  util- 
ity in  the  sacraments  has  always  had  and  must  always 
have  great  power  to  keep  the  sacraments  pure  and  simple, 
to  keep  them  from  becoming  superstitious  or  fantastic; 
and  secondly,  that  every  other  rite  and  ceremony  what- 
soever, whatever  be  the  authority  it  brings,  every  form 
of  ecclesiastical  organization  and  procedure  whatsoever, 
must  ahvays  in  the  long  run  come  inexorably  to  the  test 
of  spiritual  usefulness,  and  must  stand  in  or  fall  out  of 
tlie  Church's  use  of  them  by  that. 

Of  all  the  consequences  of  this  magnifjdng  of  the  con- 
science over  authority  we  may  be  well  aware,  and  yet  not 
be  afraid  but  very  glad  to  welcome  them.  The  great 
value  of  it  is  that  it  must  give  a  character  of  constant 
freshness  and  perpetual  renewal  and  progress  and  hope 
to  religious  thought  and  life.  We  hear  much  to-day  about 
the  new  theology.  It  is  not  a  name,  it  is  not  a  thing  to 
fear.  If  man  is  really  gi-owing  nearer  to  and  not  farther 
away  from  God,  every  advancing  age  must  have  a  new 
theology.  One  may  freely  use  that  term,  the  new  theol- 
ogy, just  as  he  freely  speaks  of  the  new  astronomy  and 
the  new  chemistry.  The  stars  and  the  elements  existed 
long  before  and  lie  far  beyond  all  man's  knowledge  of 
them.  But  man,  with  his  faculty  of  knowledge,  grows 
capable  of  receiving  ever  richer  revelation  of  the  skies 
and  of  the  earth.    God  and  God's  ways  of  grace,  the  Bible 


116  ESSAYS  AND   ADDIi ESSES. 

and  its  truths  of  incarnation  and  redemj)tion  and  eternal 
life,  are  fixed  facts  entirely  independent  of  man's  know- 
ledge of  them.  They  would  shine  on  like  the  stars  even  if 
no  man  looked.  The  principle  of  authority  not  merely 
emphasizes  their  fixity,  but  insists  also  that  the  mind  of 
man  must  stand  in  an  ever-fixed  relation  to  them.  The 
principle  of  conscience,  accepting-  their  fixity,  recognizes 
and  values  the  element  of  ever-advancing  humanity,  and 
in  its  ripening  power  expects,  not  new  truth,  but  new 
knowledge  of  truth,  to  be  emerging  from  the  sea  of 
ignorance  forever. 

The  principle  of  authority  looks  back ;  the  principle  of 
conscience  looks  forward.  Since  aU  truth  in  all  times  is 
one,  it  must  be  that  all  earnest  men  who  look  for  truth  in 
any  one  direction  must  often  be  the  means  of  pointing 
out  Avhere  truth  lies  in  other  directions  than  that  in  which 
they  look.  Thus,  no  doubt,  the  champions  of  j^ure  author- 
ity have  often  enlarged  religious  thouglit.  Columbus 
sailed  to  find  the  Old  World,  and  he  found  the  New.  This 
we  must  joyfully  grant,  Ijut  none  the  less  we  may  believe 
that  the  enthronement  of  authority  as  the  regal  principle 
in  Christian  thought  is  very  dangerous.  It  tends  to  kill 
enterprise ;  to  cultivate  sophistry ;  to  perjietuate  error ;  to 
magnify  machineries  and  little  things,  and  to  hinder  the 
progress  of  mankind. 

Every  real  question  goes  deep  and  fixes  its  roots  about 
the  heart  of  things.  I  am  sure  that  the  question  which 
we  are  to  discuss  this  evening  goes  very  deep  and  involves 
the  whole  nature  of  religious  truth.  Are  the  truths  of 
religion,  the  truths  and  doctrines  of  Christianity,  outside 
and  wholly  foreign  things,  ha\ing  no  essential  belonging 
with  the  soul  of  man,  not  anticipated  there,  brought  in 
entirely  from  anotlier  world,  and  lying,  when  once  there, 
like  the  jewel  in  its  setting,  with  no  vital  relations  be- 
tween them  and  the  soul  in  which  they  lie  ?     If  so,  the 


AUTHORITY  AND   CONSCIENCE.  117 

principle  of  authority  must  be  the  great  principle  in  the 
imparting  of  Clu'istian  truth.  On  the  other  hand,  is  Chris- 
tianity the  fiiMlment  of  man's  best  hopes,  the  answer  to 
man's  deepest  needs  ?  Is  essentialness  and  not  arbitrari- 
ness its  soul  and  genius?  Is  redemption  the  perfection 
of  humanity  in  its  own  human  lines  ?  Is  the  Church  the 
ideal  human  society  ?  Does  Christian  truth  lie  in  the  soul 
which  it  has  entered  like  the  seed  in  the  field,  each  made 
for  each  ?  Is  Christ  the  Lord  of  man  ?  Is  eternal  life  the 
deepening  of  the  present  life  and  not  merely  its  substitu- 
tion by  another  life  some  day  ?  If  the  answers  to  all  these 
questions  must  be  strong  affirmatives,  then  the  conscience, 
not  the  authority,  must  be  the  final  appeal;  in  the  con- 
science, not  in  authority,  must  he  the  final  warrant  of  all 
Christian  truth. 

All  real  questions  settle  themselves.  What  if  it  should 
appear  that  this  question  of  ours,  the  question  whether 
authority  or  conscience  is  to  produce  faith,  settled  itself 
most  conclusively  by  its  gradually  growing  evident  that 
authority  by  its  very  nature  cannot  produce  faith,  because 
that  which  authority  produces  when  it  has  done  its  per- 
fect work  is,  in  the  nature  of  things,  not  faith,  but  only 
assent?  This,  I  believe,  is  the  profoundest  truth  ui)on 
this  subject,  and  the  real  key  of  all  the  matter.  It  is  not 
a  question  whether  you  will  carve  your  statue  with  a 
chisel  or  a  brush,  because  statues  are  not  carved  with 
brushes,  but  with  chisels ;  because  that  which  a  brush 
makes  is  not  a  statue  but  a  picture.  So,  to  say  that  faith 
henceforth  must  be  made  by  authority  would  be  to  say 
that  henceforth  there  can  be  no  more  faith ;  that  the 
Christian  Church  is  dead. 

But  it  is  not  dead.  It  is  a  living  Church,  still  receiving 
messages  and  inspirations  from,  nay,  rather  still  feeling 
within  itself,  the  moving  Spirit  of  its  Master,  still  liable 
to  error,  still  able  to  distinguish  truth  from  error  and  its 


118  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

Master's  movements  from  its  own  self-will  and  from  the 
enemy's  delusions  ouly  by  the  faithfid  use  of  its  own  con- 
secrated faculties,  by  its  present  conscience  judging  each 
present  problem  in  the  brightest  and  purest  light  it  can 
command.  Such  is  the  living  Church,  in  which  our  souls 
must  live. 

Has  such  a  Church  no  dangers?  Indeed,  it  has  count- 
less dangers,  but  its  very  dangers  are  alive  and  hopefiQ 
in  comparison  with  the  dead  and  hopeless  dangers  of  a 
Church  which,  under  the  strong  power  of  authority,  com- 
mits itself  to  a  half -developed,  a  half -recorded,  and  a  half- 
imderstood  past. 


A  CENTURY  OF  CHURCH  GROWTH  IN  BOSTON. 

(Memorial  History  of  Bostou,  Mass.,  1885.) 

The  Rev.  Joshua  Wingate  Weeks  was  a  minister  of  the 
Church  of  England,  and  a  missionary  of  tlie  Society  for 
the  Propagation  of  the  Gospel  in  Foreign  Parts,  settled 
at  Marblehead,  in  Massachusetts.  In  the  year  1778  he 
wrote  to  the  society  an  account  of  "  The  State  of  the  Epis- 
copal Churches  in  the  Province  of  Massachusetts  Bay, 
New  Hampshire,  etc."  Of  the  churches  in  Boston  he 
wrote  :  "  Trinity  Chiu'ch  in  Boston  is  still  open,  the  pray- 
ers for  the  king  and  royal  family,  etc.,  being  omitted. 
The  King's  Chapel  is  made  use  of  as  a  meeting-house  by 
a  dissenting  congregation.  The  French  have  received 
leave  from  the  Congress  to  make  use  of  Christ  Church 
for  the  purposes  of  then*  worship ;  but  the  proprietors  of 
it,  having  notice  of  this,  persuaded  Mr.  Parker  to  preach 
in  it  every  Sunday  in  the  afternoon,  b}^  which  means  it 
remains  untouched.  ...  In  a  word,"  he  adds,  "  our  eccle- 
siastical affairs  wear  a  very  gloomy  aspect  at  present  in 
that  part  of  the  world." 

What  Mr.  Weeks  thus  wrote  in  1778  was  mainly  true 
two  years  later,  in  1780,  at  the  point  where  I  begin  to 
sketch  the  history  of  the  Episcopal  Chm-ch  in  Boston  for 
the  last  hundred  years.  In  the  meantime  the  Rev.  Stephen 
C.  Lewis,  who  had  been  chaplain  of  a  regiment  of  light 
dragoons  in  the  armj^  of  General  Burgoyne,  had  become 
the  regular  minister  of  Christ  Church ;  but  the  congrega- 
tion of  the  Old  South  were  stiU  worshiping  in  the  King's 

119 


120  ^^^jr^  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Chapel,  and  the  Rev.  Dr.  Samuel  Parker  was  in  charge  of 
Trinity.  These  were  the  thi-ee  Episcopal  parishes  in  Bos- 
ton in  the  year  1780 :  the  King's  Chapel,  with  its  honse 
of  worship  on  Tremont  Street,  Christ  Church  in  Salem 
Street,  and  Trinity  Church  in  Summer  Street.  The  King's 
Chapel  had  been  in  existence  since  1689,  Christ  Church 
since  1723,  and  Trinity  Church  since  1734. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  see  what  it  was  that  made  ''  our 
ecclesiastical  affairs"  wear  such  a  '' gloomy  aspect  in  this 
part  of  the  world  "  in  the  daj^s  which  immediately  followed 
the  Revolution.  To  the  old  Puritan  dislike  of  episcopacy 
had  been  added  the  distrust  of  the  English  Church  as  the 
Church  of  the  oppressors  of  the  colonies.  Up  to  the  be- 
ginning of  the  Revolution  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Boston 
had  been  counted  an  intruder.  It  had  never  been  the 
Church  of  the  peoj^le,  but  had  largely  lived  upon  the 
patronage  and  favor  of  the  English  governors.  The  out- 
break of  the  Revolution  had  found  the  Rev.  Dr.  Henrj^ 
Caner  rector  of  King's  Chapel,  and  the  Rev.  Dr.  William 
"Walter  rector  of  Trinity.  Both  of  these  clergymen  went 
to  Halifax  with  the  British  troops  when  Boston  was  evac- 
uated in  1776.  In  one  of  the  record-books  of  King's 
Chapel  Dr.  Caner  made  the  following  entry: 

"An  unnatural  rebellion  of  the  colonies  against  His 
Majesty's  government  obliged  the  loyal  part  of  his  sub- 
jects to  evacuate  their  dwellings  and  substance,  and  take 
refuge  in  Halifax,  London,  and  elsewhere ;  by  which 
means  the  public  worship  at  King's  Chapel  became  sus- 
pended, and  is  likel}^  to  remain  so  until  it  shall  please 
God,  in  the  course  of  His  providence,  to  change  the  hearts 
of  the  rebels,  or  give  success  to  His  Majesty's  arms  for 
suppressing  the  rebellion.  Two  boxes  of  church  plate 
and  a  silver  christening-basin  were  left  in  the  hands  of 
the  Rev.  Dr.  Brejaiton  at  Halifax,  to  be  delivered  to  me 
or  my  order,  agreeable  to  his  note  receipt  in  my  hands." 


A  CENTURY  OF  CHUIiCH  GROWTH  IN  BOSTON.      121 

At  Christ  Church  the  Rev.  Dr.  Mather  Byles,  Jr.,  re- 
signed the  rectorship  on  Easter  Tuesday,  1775,  meaning 
to  go  to  Portsmouth  in  New  Hampshire ;  but  poUtical 
tumults  making  that  impossible,  he  remained  in  Boston, 
and  performed  the  duty  of  chaplain  to  some  of  the  regi- 
ments until  after  the  evacuation.  At  Trinity  alone  was 
there  any  real  attempt  to  meet  the  new  condition  of  things 
by  changes  in  the  Church's  worship.  The  parts  of  the 
Liturgy  having  reference  to  the  king  and  the  royal  family 
were  omitted,  and  this  was  the  only  sign  which  the  Ej^is- 
copal  Church  in  Boston  made  of  any  willingness  to  ac- 
commodate herself  to  the  patriotic  feeling  of  the  times ; 
and  even  with  her  mutilated  Liturgy  the  associations  of 
her  worship  with  the  hated  power  of  England  still  re- 
mained. No  doubt  the  few  people  who  gathered  in  Trin- 
ity Church  during  the  Revolution  were  those  whose 
sympathy  Avith  the  cause  of  the  strnggling  colonies  was 
weakest  and  most  doubtful.  As  one  looks  at  her  position 
when  the  war  is  closed  he  sees  clearl}^  that  before  the 
Episcopal  Church  can  become  a  powerful  element  in 
American  life  she  has  before  her,  first,  a  struggle  for  ex- 
istence ;  and  then  another  struggle,  hardly  less  difficult, 
to  separate  herself  from  English  influences  and  standards, 
and  to  throw  herself  heartily  into  the  interests  and  hopes 
of  the  new  nation. 

Of  how  those  two  struggles  began  in  the  country  at 
large,  when  the  Revolutionary  War  was  over  and  our  inde- 
pendence was  established,  there  is  not  room  here  to  speak 
except  very  briefl}'.  It  was  the  sprouting  of  a  tree  which 
had  been  cut  down  to  the  very  roots.  The  earliest  sign 
of  life  was  a  meeting  at  New  Brunswick,  in  New  Jersey, 
in  1784,  when  thirteen  clergymen  and  lajnnen  from  New 
York,  New  Jersej',  and  Pennsylvania  came  together  to  see 
what  could  be  made  of  the  fragments  of  the  Church  of 
England  which  were  scattered  through  the  now  indepen- 


122  jlSSAYS  jxj)  addresses. 

dent  colonies.  The  same  year  tliere  was  a  meeting  held 
in  Boston,  where  seven  clergymen  of  Massachusetts  and 
Rhode  Island  consulted  on  the  condition  and  prospects  of 
their  church.  The  next  year  there  was  a  larger  meeting 
held  in  Philadelphia — what  may  be  called  the  first  con- 
vention of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  the  United  States — 
when  delegates  from  seven  of  the  thirteen  States  were 
assembled.  This  was  on  September  27,  1785.  Evidently 
the  fragments  of  the  Church  had  life  in  them,  and  a  ten- 
dency to  reach  toward  each  other  and  seek  a  corporate 
existence.  From  the  beginning,  too,  there  evidently  was 
in  many  parts  of  the  Church  a  certain  sense  of  oppor- 
tunity, a  feeling  that  now  was  the  time  to  seek  some  en- 
largement of  the  Church's  standards  which  would  not  prob- 
ably occur  again.  Under  this  feeling,  when  the  time  for 
the  revision  of  the  Liturgy  arrived,  the  Athanasian  Creed 
was  dropped  out  of  the  Prayer-book.  The  other  changes 
made  were  mostly  such  as  the  new  political  condition  of 
the  country  called  for.  These  changes  were  definitely 
fixed  in  the  convention  which  met  in  Philadelphia  in  1789. 
But  before  that  time  another  most  important  question 
had  been  settled.  There  could  be  no  Episcopal  Church 
in  this  country  without  bishops,  and  as  yet  there  was  not 
a  bishop  of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  the  country.  In  the 
colonial  condition  vari(^us  efforts  had  been  made  to  secure 
the  consecration  of  bishops  for  America,  but  political  fears 
and  prejudices  had  always  prevented  their  success;  but 
no  sooner  was  independence  thoroughly  estabhshed  than 
a  more  determined  effort  was  begun.  In  1783  the  Rev. 
Dr.  Samuel  Seabury  was  sent  aljroad  by  some  of  the  clergy- 
men of  Connecticut  to  endeavor  to  secure  consecration 
to  the  episcopate  to  which  they  had  elected  him.  After 
fruitless  attempts  to  induce  the  authorities  of  the  Church 
of  England  to  give  him  what  he  sought,  he  finally  had 
recourse  to  the  non-juring  Church  in  Scotland,  and  was 


A  CENTURY  OF  CHUECH  GROWTH  IX  BOSTON.      123 

consecrated  at  Aberdeen,  on  November  14,  1784.  He  re- 
turned at  once  to  America  and  began  to  do  a  bishojj's 
work.  The  first  ordination  of  an  Episcopal  minister  in 
Boston,  which  must  have  been  an  occasion  of  some  inter- 
est in  the  Puritan  city,  was  on  March  27,  1789,  when  the 
Rev.  John  C.  Ogden  was  ordained  in  Trinity  Church  by 
Bishop  Seabury. 

Meanwhile,  farther  south,  a  similar  attempt  was  being 
made  to  secui'e  Episcopal  consecration  from  the  Church 
of  England,  and  with  better  success.  On  February  4, 
1787,  the  Rev.  Dr.  William  White  of  Philadelphia  and 
the  Rev.  Dr.  Samuel  Provoost  of  New  York  were  conse- 
crated bishops  in  the  chapel  of  Lambeth  Palace.  Thus 
the  Episcopal  Church  in  the  United  States  found  itself 
fully  organized  for  its  work.  On  May  7,  1797,  the  Rev. 
Dr.  Edward  Bass  of  Newbnryport  was  consecrated  in 
Christ  Chm'cli,  Philadelphia,  to  be  bishoj)  of  the  diocese 
of  Massachusetts ;  and  the  churches  of  Boston  became,  of 
course,  subjects  of  his  episcopal  care. 

It  inust  have  been  a  striking,  as  it  Avas  certainly  a 
novel,  scene  when  Bishop  Bass,  on  his  return  to  Boston 
after  his  consecration,  was  welcomed  b}^  the  Massachusetts 
Convention,  which  was  then  in  session.  He  was  conducted 
in  liis  robes  from  the  vestry  of  Trinity  Church  to  the  chan- 
cel, where  he  was  addressed  in  behalf  of  the  members  of 
the  convention  by  the  Rev.  Dr.  Walter,  now  returned  from 
his  exile  in  Nova  Scotia,  and  made  rector  of  Clirist  Church. 
The  bishop  responded  "in  terms  of  great  modesty,  pro- 
priety, and  affection."  Some  time  after,  the  Episcopal 
churches  in  Rhode  Island,  and  subsequently  those  in  New 
Hampshire,  placed  themselves  under  his  jurisdiction. 

It  had  not  been  without  reluctance  and  a  jealous  un- 
willingness to  surrender  their  independence  that  the 
churches  in  Massachusetts  had  joined  their  brethren  in 
the  other  States  to  accomplish  the  reorganization  of  their 


124  i:SSJYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

Church ;  but  in  the  end  two  of  the  Boston  churches  be- 
came identified  with  the  new  body.  To  Dr.  Parker,  in- 
deed, of  Trinity  Church,  a  considerable  degree  of  influence 
is  to  be  ascribed  in  liarmonizing  difficulties,  and  making- 
possible  a  union  between  the  two  efforts  after  organized 
life  which  had  begun  in  Connecticut  and  Pennsylvania. 
Before,  however,  the  General  Constitution  of  the  Epis- 
copal Church  was  agreed  upon,  in  Philadelphia,  in  1789, 
the  oldest  of  the  three  parishes  in  Boston  had  changed  its 
faith  and  its  associations,  and  begun  its  own  separate  and 
peculiar  life.  It  w^as  before  the  Revolutionary  War  was 
ended,  and  while  their  house  of  worship  was  still  used  by 
the  congregation  of  the  Old  South,  in  September,  1782, 
that  the  wardens  of  King's  Chapel — Dr.  Thonlas  Bulfinch 
and  Mr.  James  Ivers — invited  Mr.  James  Freeman,  a 
young  man  of  twenty-three  years  of  age,  then  living  at 
Walpole,  to  officiate  for  them  as  reader  for  six  months. 
He  was  a  native  of  Charlestown,  had  received  his  early 
education  at  the  Boston  Latin  School,  and  had  graduated 
at  Harvard  College  in  1777.  At  the  Easter  meeting, 
April  21,  1783,  he  was  chosen  pastor  of  the  chapel.  The 
invitation,  in  reply  to  which  he  accepted  the  pastorate, 
said  to  him :  ''  The  pro]3rietors  consent  to  such  altera- 
tions in  the  service  as  are  made  by  the  Rev.  Dr.  Parker, 
and  leave  the  use  of  the  Athanasian  Creed  at  your  dis- 
cretion." 

The  new  pastor  and  his  people  soon  grew  warmly  at- 
tached to  one  another;  and  when,  in  the  course  of  the 
next  two  years,  Mr.  Freeman  told  his  parishioners  that 
his  opinions  had  undergone  such  a  change  that  he  found 
some  parts  of  the  Liturgy  inconsistent  with  the  faith 
which  he  had  come  to  hold,  and  offered  them  an  amended 
form  of  prayer  for  use  at  the  chapel,  the  i^rojjrietors 
voted,  February  20,  1785,  that  it  was  necessary  to  make 
some  alterations  in  some  parts  of  the  Liturgy,  and  ap- 


A  CEXTUBY  OF  CHVECH  GROWTH  IX  BOSTON.     125 

pointed  a  eommittee  to  report  such  alterations.  On 
March  28th  the  committee  were  ready  with  their  report, 
and  on  June  19th  the  proprietors  decided,  by  a  vote  of 
twenty  to  seven,  ''that  the  Common  Prayer,  as  it  now 
stands  amended,  be  adopted  by  this  chui-cli  as  the  form 
of  prayer  to  be  used  in  future  by  this  chiu'ch  and  congre- 
gation." The  alterations  in  the  Liturgy  were,  for  the 
most  part,  such  as  involved  the  omission  of  the  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity.  They  were  principall}'^  those  of  the  cele- 
brated English  divine,  Dr.  Samuel  Clarke.  The  amended 
Prayer-book  was  used  in  the  chapel  until  1811,  when  it 
was  again  revised,  and  still  other  changes  made. 

Thus  the  oldest  of  the  Episcopal  churches  had  become 
the  fii'st  of  the  Unitarian  churches  of  America ;  and  now 
the  question  was  how  she  stiU  stood  toward  the  sister- 
churches  with  whom  she  had  heretofore  been  in  commu- 
nion. Her  people  stdl  comited  themselves  Episcopalians. 
They  wanted  to  be  part  of  the  new  Episcopal  Church  of 
the  United  States.  Many  of  them  were  more  or  less  un- 
easy at  the  lack  of  ordination  for  their  minister.  In  1786 
Mr.  Freeman  appUed  to  Bishop  Seabuiy  to  be  ordained ; 
but  Bishop  Seabury,  after  asking  the  advice  of  his  clergj^, 
did  not  think  fit  to  confer  orders  upon  him  on  such  a 
profession  of  faith  as  he  thought  proper  to  give,  which 
was  no  more  than  that  he  believed  the  Scriptures.  Mr. 
Freeman  then  went  to  see  Dr.  Provoost  at  New  York. 
The  doctor,  who  was  not  yet  a  bishop,  gave  Mr.  Freeman 
some  reason  to  hope  that  he  would  comply  %\'ith  his  wishes ; 
but  in  the  next  year,  when  the  wardens  of  the  chapel  sent 
a  letter  to  Dr.  Provoost,  who  in  the  meantime  had  received 
consecration,  "to  inquire  whether  ordination  for  the  Rev. 
Mr.  Freeman  can  be  obtained  on  terms  agreeable  to  him 
and  to  the  proprietors  of  this  church,"  the  bishop  answered 
that,  after  consulting  with  his  council  for  ad\T.ce,  he  and 
they  thought  that  a  matter  of  such  importance  ought  to 


126  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

be  reserved  for  the  consideration  of  the  General  Con- 
vention. 

This  ended  the  effort  for  episcopal  ordination,  and  on 
November  18,  1787,  after  the  usual  Sunday  evening  ser- 
vice, the  senior  warden  of  the  King's  Chapel,  Dr.  Thomas 
Bulfinch,  acting  for  the  congregation,  ordained  Mr.  Free- 
man to  be  "  rector,  minister,  priest,  pastor,  teaching  elder, 
and  public  teacher  "  of  their  society.  Of  course  so  bold 
and  so  unusual  an  act  excited  violent  remonstrance.  A 
protest  was  sent  forth  by  certain  of  the  original  proprie- 
tors of  the  chapel,  to  which  the  wardens  issued  a  reply. 
Another  protest  came  from  Dr.  Bass  of  Newburyport,  Dr. 
Parker,  of  Trinity  Church,  Mr.  Montague,  of  Christ 
Church,  nnd  Mr.  Ogdon,  of  Portsmouth  in  New  Hamp- 
shire ;  but  from  the  day  of  Mi-.  Freeman's  ordination  the 
King's  Chapel  ceased  to  be  counted  among  the  Episcopal 
churches  of  Boston.  There  still  remained  some  questions 
to  be  settled  with  regard  to  the  bequest  of  Mi-.  WiUiam 
Price,  the  founder  of  the  Price  lectureship,  of  which  the 
King's  Chapel  had  been  the  original  administrator.  These 
questions  lingered  until  1824,  when  they  were  finally  dis- 
posed of  by  the  arrangement  between  the  King's  Chapel 
and  Trinity  Church,  under  which  these  lectures  are  still 
provided  by  the  latter. 

It  was  a  severe  blow  to  the  Church,  which  was  with 
such  difficulty  struggling  back  to  life,  that  one  of  the 
strongest  of  her  very  few  parishes  should  thus  reject  her 
creed  and  abandon  her  fellowship.  The  whole  transaction 
bears  evidence  of  the  confusion  of  the  ecclesiastical  life 
of  those  distracted  days.  The  spirit  of  Unitarianism  was 
ah*eady  present  in  many  of  the  Congregational  churches 
of  New  England.  It  was  because  in  the  King's  Chapel 
that  spirit  met  the  clear  terms  of  a  stated  and  required 
liturgy  that  that  Church  was  the  first  to  set  itself  avow- 
edly upon  the  basis  of  the  new  belief.     The  attachment 


A  CENTURY  OF  CRUBCH  GROWTH  IX  BOSTON.     127 

to  the  Liturgy  was  satisfied  by  the  retention  of  so  much 
of  its  well-known  form ;  and  the  high  character  of  Mr. 
Freeman,  and  the  profound  respect  which  his  sincerity 
and  piety  and  learning  won  in  all  the  town,  did  a  great 
deal  to  strengthen  the  establishment  of  the  behef  to  which 
his  congregation  gave  their  assent. 

Clu-ist  Church  and  Trinity  Church  alone  were  left — two 
vigorous  parishes — to  keep  alive  for  many  years  the  fire 
of  the  Episcopal  Clnu'ch  in  Boston.  In  1792  Dr.  Walter 
returned  to  Boston,  and  became  rector  of  Clu'ist  Church, 
where  he  remained  until  his  death,  in  1800.  In  the  same 
year  (1792)  the  Rev.  John  Sylvester  John  Gardiner  be- 
came the  assistant  of  Dr.  Parker  at  Trinity  Church.  Dr. 
Gardiner's  ministry  is  one  of  those  which  give  strong 
character  to  the  life  of  the  Episcopal  Chui-ch  here  during 
the  century.  Born  in  Wales,  and  in  large  part  educated 
in  England,  he  was  the  true  Anglican  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  For  thirty-seven  years  he  was  the  best-known 
and  most  influential  of  the  Episcopal  ministers  of  Boston. 
His  broad  and  finished  scholarship,  his  strong  and  posi- 
tive manhood,  his  genial  hospitality,  his  fatherly  affection, 
and  his  eloquence  and  wit,  made  him  through  all  those 
years  a  marked  and  powerful  person,  not  merely  in  the 
Church,  but  in  the  towns. 

After  the  year  1790  the  Diocesan  Conventions  of  the 
Episcopal  Church  in  Massachusetts  became  regular  and 
constant.  They  were  generally  held  in  Boston — their 
religious  services  mostly  in  Trinity  Church,  and  their 
business  sessions  usualty  in  Concert  Hall.  The  business 
which  they  had  to  do  was  very  small,  but  every  year  seems 
to  show  a  slightly  increasing  strength.  In  1795  the  Rev. 
Dr.  Parker  and  Mr.  William  Tudor  were  sent  as  delegates 
to  the  General  Convention  which  was  to  meet  in  Phila- 
delphia in  the  following  September,  so  that  the  Church  in 
Massachusetts  had  now  become  entirely  a  part  of  the 


128  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

General  Church  throughout  the  land.  In  1797  a  com- 
mittee was  sent  to  Samuel  Adams,  the  governor,  to  ask 
him  not  to  appoint  the  annual  fast  day  in  such  a  way  that 
it  should  fall  in  Easter  week,  in  order  that  it  might  not 
"wound  the  feeliugs  of  so  many  of  the  citizens  of  this 
commonwealth  as  compose  the  bod}-  of  the  Protestant 
Episcopalians."  In  various  ways  one  traces  the  slow 
growth  of  the  Church ;  yet  still  it  was  a  very  little  body. 
In  1800,  at  the  meeting  of  the  convention  of  the  diocese, 
"  in  the  library  in  Franklin  Place,"  it  was  only  five  clergy- 
men, of  whom  one  was  the  bishop,  and  six  laymen  that 
made  up  the  assembly. 

In  1803  Bishop  Bass  died,  after  an  administration 
which  was  full  of  good  sense  and  piety,  but  which  had 
not  enough  energy  or  positive  character  to  give  the 
Church  a  strong  position,  or  to  secure  much  promise  for 
its  future.  The  only  other  man  who  had  stood  at  his 
post  during  the  Revolution — the  man  to  whom,  as  his  suc- 
cessor. Dr.  Gardiner,  said  of  him  in  his  funeral  sermon, 
"must  doubtless  lie  attributed  the  preservation  of  the 
Episcopal  Church  in  this  town  " — Dr.  Samuel  Parker,  of 
Trinity  Church,  was  chosen  to  be  the  successor  of  Bishop 
Bass ;  but  he  died  on  December  6,  1804,  before  he  had 
performed  any  of  the  duties  of  his  office,  and  the  diocese 
was  once  more  without  a  bishop.  Indeed,  in  these  early 
days  it  was  not  by  any  special  oversight  or  inspiration  of 
the  bishops  that  the  Episcopal  Church  was  growing  strong. 
It  was  by  the  long  and  faithful  pastorship  of  the  ministers 
of  her  parishes.  Such  a  pastorship  had  been  that  of  Dr. 
Parker.  For  thirty-one  years  Trinity  Church  enjoyed  his 
care.  "  I  well  remember  him,"  writes  Dr.  Lowell,  of  the 
West  Church,  "as  a  tall,  well-proportioDcd  man,  with  a 
broad,  cheerful,  and  rubicund  face,  and  flowiug  hair;  of 
fiue  powers  of  conversation,  and  easy  and  affable  in  his 
manners.     He  was  given  to  hospitality,  and  went  about 


A  CENTURY  OF  CHURCH  GROWTH  IN  BOSTON.     129 

doing  good."  He,  too,  was  a  man  of  the  eigliteentli  cen- 
tury, not  the  nineteenth ;  but  he  was  thoroughl}^  the  man 
for  his  own  time,  and  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Boston  will 
always  be  his  debtor.  In  the  year  after  Bishop  Parker 
died  another  of  the  long  and  useful  pastorates  of  Boston 
began  in  the  succession  of  the  Rev.  Asa  Eaton  to  the  rec- 
torship of  Christ  Church,  where  he  remained  until  1829. 

It  was  not  until  1811  that  it  was  found  practicable  to 
unite  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Massachusetts  with  the 
same  Church  in  Rhode  Island  and  New  Hampshire,  under 
the  care  of  the  Rt.  Rev.  Alexander  Viets  Griswold,  who 
was  consecrated  bishop  of  what  was  called  the  Eastern 
Diocese.  With  Bishop  Griswold  a  new  period  of  the  life 
of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Boston  may  be  considered  to 
begin — a  j)eriod  of  growth  and  enterprise.  Up  to  this 
time  the  Church  had  been  struggling  for  life,  and  grad- 
ually separating  itself  from  the  English  traditions  which 
had  haunted  its  thought  and  hampered  its  usefulness.  It 
had  been  a  weak,  and  in  some  sense  a  foreign,  Church, 
Now  it  had  grown  to  considerable  strength.  Its  ministers 
were  true  Americans.  It  prayed  for  the  governors  and 
Congress  of  the  Union  with  entire  loyalty.  It  took,  in- 
deed, no  active  part  in  the  speculations  or  the  controver- 
sies of  the  daj^  Its  ministers  were  not  forward  in  theo- 
logical or  political  discussion.  It  rested  with  entire  satis- 
faction upon  its  completed  standards,  and  contributed  no 
active  help  to  the  settlement  of  the  theological  tumults 
which  were  raging  around  it ;  but  it  was  doing  good  and 
growing  strong.  It  had  won  for  itself  the  respect  and 
confidence  of  the  communit}^ ;  and  when  the  first  returns 
are  made  from  parishes  to  the  Diocesan  Convention  in 
1812,  the  two  Boston  churches  report  a  considerable  inim- 
ber  of  communicants.  Christ  Clnirch  has  GO,  and  Trinity 
Church  has  150,  and  on  the  great  festivals  as  many  as  300. 

The  second  period,  the  period  of  growth  and  some  en- 


130  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

terprise,  may  be  said  to  extend  from  1811  to  1843,  The 
earliest  addition  to  the  nnnibev  of  chnrches,  which  had 
remained  the  same  ever  since  the  departure  of  King's 
Chapel,  was  in  the  foundation  of  St.  Matthew's  Church, 
in  what  was  then  the  little  district  of  South  Boston.  That 
picturesque  peninsula,  which  now  teems  with  crowded  life, 
had  in  1816  a  population  of  seven  or  eight  hundred.  In 
that  year  the  services  of  the  Episcopal  Church  were  begun 
by  a  devoted  layman,  Mr.  John  H.  Cotting,  and  two  years 
later  a  church  building  was  consecrated  there  liy  Bishop 
Griswold.  The  parish  has  passed  through  many  vicissi- 
tudes and  dangers  since  that  day ;  but  it  has  always  re- 
tained its  life  and  done  good  service  to  the  multitudes 
who  have  gradually  gathered  around  it. 

In  1819  another  new  parish  began  to  appear,  formed 
principally  out  of  Trinity  Church ;  and  on  June  3,  1820, 
the  new  St.  Paul's  Church  in  Tremont  Street  was  conse- 
crated by  Bishop  Grriswold,  assisted  by  Bishop  Brownell 
of  Connecticut.  The  first  rector  of  the  new  parish  was 
the  Rev.  Samuel  Farmer  Jarvis,  a  native  of  Connecticut, 
an  ecclesiastic  of  sincere  devotion  to  his  Church,  and  a 
scholar  of  excellent  attainments.  St.  Paul's  Church  made 
a  notable  and  permanent  addition  to  the  power  of  episco- 
pacy in  the  city.  Its  Grecian  temple  seemed  to  the  men 
who  built  it  to  be  a  triumph  of  architectural  beauty  and 
of  fitness  for  the  church's  services.  "The  interior  of  St. 
Paul's,"  so  it  was  written  while  the  church  was  new,  "  is 
remarkal^le  for  its  simplicity  and  beauty ;  and  the  mate- 
rials of  which  the  building  is  constructed  give  it  an  in- 
trinsic value  and  effect  which  have  not  been  produced  by 
any  of  the  classic  models  that  have  been  attempted  of 
bricks  and  plaster  in  other  cities.  The  erection  of  this 
church  may  be  considered  the  commencement  of  an  era  of 
the  art  in  Boston."  On  its  building  committee,  among 
other  well-known  men,  were  George  Sullivan,  Daniel  Web- 


A  CENTURY  OF  CHURCH  GROWTH  IX  BOSTON.      131 

ster,  David  Sears,  aud  William  Sliiiiimin.  When  it  was 
finished  it  had  cost  $83,000.  The  parish  leaped  at  once 
into  strength,  and  in  1821  it  reports  that  "it  has  90  com- 
nmnicants,  and  that  between  600  and  700  persons  attend 
its  services."  In  1824,  when  Boston  had  reached  a  popu- 
lation of  58,000,  the  four  Episcopal  Churches  whicli  it 
contained  numbered  in  all  63'4  communicants;  certainly 
not  a  great  number,  but  certainly  an  appreciable  propor- 
tion of  the  religious  connn  unity. 

In  1827  Dr.  Alonzo  Potter  succeeded  Dr.  Jarvis  at  St. 
Paul's,  and  he  brought  with  him  that  broad,  strong  intel- 
lect and  noble  character  and  earnest  zeal  which  made  him 
all  his  life  one  of  the  very  strongest  powers  in  the  Epis- 
copal Church  of  the  United  States.  In  the  same  year  the 
Rev.  George  W.  Doane,  who  was  afterward  the  successor 
of  Dr.  Gardiner  at  Trinity,  came  to  be  his  assistant. 
These  were  both  notable  additions  to  the  Church's  minis- 
try in  Boston.  They  were  men  of  modern  character; 
they  put  new  life  into  the  now  well-established  Church. 
The  very  drjmess  of  the  tree  when  it  was  brought  hither 
from  England  had  perhaps  made  it  more  possible  to  trans- 
plant it  safely  ;  but  now  that  its  roots  were  in  the  ground, 
it  was  ready  for  more  vigorous  life.  In  quite  different 
ways,  with  very  dissimilar  characters  and  habits  of  thought. 
Dr.  Potter  and  Dr.  Doane  represent,  not  unfitly,  the  two 
great  tendencies  toward  rational  breadth  and  toward  eccle- 
siastical complexity,  which  were  beginning  to  take  posses- 
sion not  merely  of  this  church,  but  of  all  the  churches. 
The  Rev.  John  H.  Hopkins,  who  in  1831  became  the  assis- 
tant of  Dr.  Doane  at  Trinity,  was  another  of  the  strong 
characters  who  showed  the  Church's  greater  life. 

Another  name  of  great  interest  in  the  Church  history 
of  Boston  appeared  in  1829,  when  the  Rev.  William  Cros- 
well  came  from  Hartford,  a  young  deacon  just  ordained, 
to  succeed  Dr.  Eaton  at  Christ  Church.     Dr.  Eaton's  min- 


132  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

istry  had  been  long  and  nsefnl.  He  had  established,  in 
1815,  the  first  Sunday-school  which  ever  existed  in  this 
region.  His  parish  had  no  donbt  already  begun  to  change 
with  the  changes  of  the  city's  population ;  but  when  Mr. 
Croswell  came  there  it  was  still  strong,  and  though  his 
most  remarkable  ministry  was  to  be  elsewhere  than  in 
Christ  Church,  his  coming  there  marks  the  first  advent  to 
the  city  of  one  of  the  most  interesting  men  who  have  ever 
filled  its  Episcopal  pulpits. 

The  slow  addition  of  parish  after  parish  still  went  on. 
In  1830  Grace  Church,  which  had  been  struggling  with 
much  difficulty  into  life,  aj)pears  at  last  as  an  organized 
parish,  and  is  admitted  into  union  wdth  the  Convention. 
At  first  the  new  congregation  worshiped  in  Piedmont 
Square,  and  then  in  Bedford  Street.  It  was  not  imtil 
1836  that  its  new  stone  church  in  Temple  Street  was  fin- 
ished and  consecrated.  In  Roxbury  the  first  movement 
toward  the  establishment  of  an  Episcoj)al  church  began 
to  appear  as  early  as  1832 ;  and  after  worshipiug  for  a 
while  in  a  building  called  the  Female  High  School,  the 
new  parish  finished  and  occupied  its  sober,  serious  stone 
structure  on  St.  James'  Street  in  1834.  Its  first  rector 
was  the  Rev.  M.  A.  DeWolf  Howe,  who  is  now  the  bishop 
of  the  diocese  of  Central  Pennsylvania.  While  these  new 
parishes  were  si^ringiug  into  life  the  old  parish  of  Trinity 
was  building  its  new  house  of  worship,  which  was  to  stand 
until  the  great  fire  should  sweej)  it  away  in  1872.  The 
solid,  battlemented  Gothic  church,  which  for  so  many 
years  stood  and  frowned  at  the  corner  of  Summer  and 
Hawley  Streets,  was  consecrated  on  November  11,  1829. 
The  next  year  Dr.  Gardiner,  for  so  many  years  the  hon- 
ored minister  of  the  parish,  died  in  England,  where  he 
was  seeking  his  lost  health,  and  Dr.  Doane  became  rector 
of  Trinity  Church  in  his  stead. 

In  these  years  also  another  man  appears  for  the  first 


A  CENTUBT  OF  CHURCH  GROWTH  IN  BOSTUX.     133 

time,  who  is  afterward  to  liold  a  peculiar  place  in  the  life 
of  the  Church  in  Boston,  to  be,  indeed,  the  rej^resentative 
figure  in  its  charitable  work.  It  is  the  Rev.  E.  M.  P.  Wells, 
who  is  in  charge  of  the  House  of  Reformation  Chapel  at 
South  Boston.  Indeed,  now  for  the  fii'st  time  there  began 
to  be  a  movement  of  the  Episcopal  Chui"ch  toward  the 
masses  of  the  poor  and  helpless.  Up  to  this  time  it  had 
been  almost  altogether  the  Church  of  the  rich  and  influ- 
ential. It  had  prided  itself  upon  the  respectability  of  its 
membership  ;  but  in  1837  St.  Paul's,  which  had  now  passed 
into  the  earnest  and  fruitful  ministry  of  the  Rev.  John  S. 
Stone,  had  a  mission  school  of  between  sixty  and  eighty 
scholars  on  Boston  Neck,  and  there  was  a  free  church  in 
the  eleventh  ward-room  in  Tremont  Street,  and  Mr.  Wells 
had  his  work  at  South  Boston.  The  movements  were  not 
very  strong  nor  very  enduring,  but  the^'  showed  a  new 
spirit,  and  were  the  promises  of  better  things  to  come. 

In  1840  there  were  the  beginnings  of  two  new  parishes. 
The  Church  at  Jamaica  Plains  was  as  yet  only  a  mission 
of  St.  James's  in  Roxbury,  and  was  under  the  charge  of 
the  rector  of  that  church  till  1845,  when  it  secured  a  min- 
ister of  its  own.  In  Charlestown  a  few  Episcopalians  met 
in  the  Congregational  Church,  and  organized  a  parish 
under  the  charge  of  the  Rev.  Nathaniel  T.  Bent.  The 
corner-stone  of  their  building  was  laid  in  1841,  and  the 
building  was  finished  the  next  year.  Both  of  these  par- 
ishes were  named  St.  John's. 

Thus,  in  1843  there  were  in  what  is  now  Boston  seven 
Episcopal  parishes.  In  that  year  Bishop  Griswold  died. 
When  he  was  chosen  bishop  in  1811  there  were  only  two 
parishes,  and  besides  this  increase  in  the  number  of  organ- 
ized churches  there  had  begun  to  be,  as  we  have  seen, 
some  movement  of  missionary  life.  These  thirty-two 
years  had  been  a  period  of  growth  and  quiet  enterprise. 
There  had  been  no  marked  stir  of  active  thouciit ;  men 


134  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

had  believed  and  tanglit  much  as  tlieir  fathers  had  before 
them.  There  liad  been  no  dispntes  or  controversies  abont 
faith  or  worship ;  bnt  all  the  time  a  fuller  and  fuller  life 
was  entering  into  the  whole  Church.  The  evangelical 
spirit,  wLich  was  the  controlling  i^ower  of  the  Church  of 
England,  ruled  the  parishes  here,  and  inspired  the  system 
which  under  the  churchmanship  of  the  eighteenth  century 
had  been  so  dead.  Of  all  this  time  the  type  and  represen- 
tative is  Bishop  Griswold.  He  stands,  indeed,  at  the  head 
of  the  active  history  of  the  Church  in  Massachusetts,  to 
give  it,  as  it  were,  its  true  kej^-uote — somewhat  as  Bishop 
White  stands  at  the  start  of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  the 
United  States  at  large  ;  or,  we  may  say,  perhaps,  as  Wash- 
ington stands  at  the  beginning  of  the  history  of  tlie  na- 
tion. He  had  the  qidet  energy  which  the  times  needed,  a 
deep  and  simple  piety,  a  si")irit  of  conciliation  which  was 
yet  full  of  sturdy  conscientiousness,  a  free  but  reverent 
treatment  of  Church  methods,  a  quiet  humor,  and  abun- 
dance of  ''■  moderation,  good  sense,  and  careful  equipoise." 
He  had  much  of  the  repose  and  peace  of  the  old  Anglican- 
ism, and  yet  was  a  true  American.  He  had  patience  and 
hope  and  courage,  sweetness  and  reasonableness  in  that 
happy  conjunction  which  will  make  his  memory,  as  the 
years  go  by,  to  be  treasured  as  something  sacred  and 
saintly  by  the  growing  Church. 

The  third  period  in  the  history  of  the  Episcopal  Church 
in  Boston,  reaching  from  1843  to  about  18G1,  is  not  so 
peaceful  as  the  last.  Before  Bishop  Griswold  died  the 
signs  of  coming  disagreement  had  appeared ;  and  even 
before  it  w^as  felt  in  this  country,  a  new  and  aggressive 
school  of  Church  life  had  taken  definite  shape  in  England. 
This  is  not  the  place  to  write  the  history  of  that  great 
movement  which,  wnthin  less  than  fifty  years,  has  so 
changed  the  life  of  the  English  Church.  In  1833  the  first 
of  the  so-named  "  Tracts  for  the  Times "  w^as  issued  at 


A  CENTURY  OF  (UlUCH  GllOJl'TH  IX  BOSTON.     135 

Oxford,  and  from  then  iintil  1841  the  constant  succession 
of  treatises  devoted  to  the  devek^pment  of  what  became 
known  as  Tractarian  or  Pnseyite  ideas  kept  alive  a  per- 
petual tumult  in  the  Church  of  Engiand.  Led  by  such 
men  as  Dr.  Pusey  and  John  Henry  Newman,  the  school 
attracted  many  of  the  ablest  and  most  devoted  of  young 
Englishmen.  The  points  which  its  theology  magnified 
were  the  apostolical  succession  of  the  ministry,  bajitismal 
regeneration,  the  eucharistic  sacrifice,  and  Church  tradi- 
tion as  a  rule  of  faith.  Connected  with  its  doctrinal  be- 
liefs there  came  an  increased  attention  to  Church  cere- 
monies and  an  effort  to  surround  the  celebration  of  divine 
worship  with  mystery  and  splendor. 

This  great  movement — this  catholic  revival,  as  its  ear- 
nest disciples  love  to  call  it — was  most  natural.  It  was 
the  protest  and  self-assertion  of  a  partly  neglected  side 
of  religious  life ;  it  was  a  reaction  against  some  of  the 
dominant  forms  of  religious  thought  which  had  become 
narrow  and  exclusive  ;  it  was  the  effort  of  the  Church  to 
complete  the  whole  sp>here  of  her  life  ;  it  was  the  expres- 
sion of  certain  perpetual  and  ineradicable  tendencies  of 
the  human  soul.  No  wonder,  therefore,  that  it  was  jjow- 
erful.  It  made  most  enthusiastic  devotees ;  it  organized 
new  forms  of  life ;  it  created  a  new  literature  ;  it  found  its 
way  into  tlie  lialls  of  legislation ;  it  changed  the  aspect 
of  whole  regions  of  education.  No  wonder,  also,  that  in 
a  place  S(^  free-minded  and  devout  as  Boston  each  one  of 
the  permanent  tendencies  of  religious  thought  and  expres- 
sion should  sooner  or  later  seek  for  admission.  Partly  in 
echo,  therefore,  of  what  was  going  on  in  England,  and 
partty  as  the  simidtaneous  result  of  the  same  causes  which 
had  produced  the  movement  tliere,  it  was  not  many  years 
before  the  same  school  arose  in  the  Episcopal  Church  in 
America ;  and  it  showed  itself  first  in  Boston,  in  the  organ- 
ization of  the  Church  of  the  Advent.     The  first  ser\'ices 


136  JiSSATS  AND   ADVIiESSES. 

of  tliis  new  parish  were  held  in  an  upper  room  at  13  Mer- 
rimac  Street,  on  December  1, 1844.  Shortly  ai'ter,  the  con- 
gregation moved  to  a  hall  at  the  corner  of  Lowell  and 
Causeway  Streets,  and  on  November  28, 1847,  it  took  pos- 
session of  a  church  in  Green  Street,  where  it  remained 
until  18G4.  Its  rector  was  Dr.  William  Croswell,  a  man 
of  most  attractive  character  and  beautiful  purity  of  life. 
We  have  seen  him  already  as  minister  of  Clnist  Church 
from  1829  to  1840.  After  his  resignation  of  that  parish  he 
became  rector  of  St.  Peter's  Church,  Auburn,  N.  Y.,  whence 
he  returncnl  to  Boston  to  undertake  the  new  work  of  the 
Church  of  the  Advent.  The  feature  made  most  promi- 
nent l)y  its  founders  with  regard  to  the  new  parish  was 
that  the  church  was  free.  Tliis,  combined  Avith  its  more 
frequent  services,  its  daily  public  recitation  of  Morning 
and  Evening  Prayer,  an  increased  attention  to  the  details 
of  worship,  the  lights  on  its  stone  altar,  and  its  use  of 
altar-cloths,  were  the  visible  signs  which  distinguished  it 
from  the  other  parishes  in  town. 

By  this  time  the  poor  and  friendless  population  of  Bos- 
ton had  grown  very  large,  and  the  minister  and  laity  of 
the  Church  of  the  Advent,  in  common  with  those  of  the 
other  parishes  in  the  city,  devoted  much  time  and  atten- 
tion to  their  visitation  and  relief. 

Bishop  Griswold,  before  his  death,  had  feared  the  influ- 
ence of  the  new  school  of  churchmanshi]),  and  had  written 
a  tract  with  the  view  of  meeting  what  he  thought  to  be 
its  dangers  ;  but  the  duty  of  dealing  with  the  new  state  of 
things  in  Boston  fell  mostly  to  the  lot  of  his  successor. 
In  the  year  1842  the  Rev.  Dr.  Manton  Eastburn,  rector 
of  the  Church  of  the  Ascension  in  New  York,  had  become 
rector  of  Trinity  Church  in  Boston,  and  had  been  conse- 
crated assistant  bishop  of  Massachusetts.  That  interest- 
ing ceremony  took  place  in  Trinity  Church  on  December 
29,  1842.     On  Bishop  Griswold's  death,  in  1843,  Bishop 


A  CEXTUIiY  OF  CHUECH  GROWTH  IN  BOSTON.     137 

Eastburu  succeeded  him,  and  iu  his  Convention  Address 
of  184-1  we  find  him  ah'eady  lifting*  up  his  voice  against 
"certain  views  which,  having  made  their  appearance  at 
various  periods  since  the  Reformation,  and  passed  away, 
have  been  again  brought  forward  in  our  time."  Tliese 
remonstrances  are  repeated  ahnost  yearly  for  the  rest  of 
the  bishop's  life.  On  December  2, 1815,  Bishop  Eastburn 
issued  a  pastoral  letter  to  the  clergy  of  his  diocese  in  which 
he  recounts  his  disapprobation  of  "various  offensive  in- 
novations upon  the  ancient  usage  of  our  Church,"  which 
lie  had  witnessed  on  the  occasion  of  a  recent  episcopal 
visit  to  the  Church  of  the  Advent.  On  November  24, 
1846,  he  writes  to  Dr.  Croswell  that  he  cannot  visit  the 
parish  officially  again  until  the  offensive  arrangements  of 
the  church  are  altered.  These  utterances  of  the  bishop 
led  to  a  long  discussion  and  correspondence,  which  lasted 
for  the  next  ten  years.  On  November  9,  1851,  Dr.  Cros- 
well died  very  suddenly,  and  Bishop  Eastburn's  discussion 
was  continued  with  his  successor,  the  Right  Rev.  Horatio 
Southgate.  It  was  not  until  December  14,  1856,  that  the 
parish  received  again  the  visitation  of  its  bishop ;  and 
in  his  report  to  the  Diocesan  Convention  in  1857  Bishop 
Eastburn  explains  the  change  in  his  action  by  saying  that 
"  the  General  Convention  having  passed  during  its  session 
in  October  last  a  nev/  canon  on  episcopal  visitations,  I 
appointed  the  above-mentioned  day,  shortly  after  the  close 
of  its  sittings,  for  a  visit  to  the  Church  of  the  Advent,  for 
the  purpose  of  administering  confirmation." 

This  closed  the  open  conflict  between  the  bishop  and 
the  parish.  In  1864  the  Church  of  the  Advent  moved 
from  Green  Street  to  its  present  building  in  Bowdoin 
Street,  where  it  was  served,  after  Bishop  Southgate's  de- 
parture in  1858,  by  the  Rev.  Mr.  Bolles.  Upon  his  resigna- 
tion, in  1870,  the  parish  passed  into  the  ministry  of  mem- 
bers of  an  English  society  of  mission  priests,  known  as  the 


138  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Brotherhood  of  St.  John  the  Evangelist,  aud  in  1872  the 
Rev.  Charles  C.  Grafton,  a  member  of  that  society,  became 
its  rector.  In  1868  it  began  the  erection  of  a  new  chnrch 
in  Brimmer  Street,  which  is  not  yet  completed.  The  pe- 
culiarities of  faith  and  worship  of  this  parish  have  always 
made  it  a  prominent  and  interesting  object  in  the  Church 
life  of  Boston. 

But  during  these  years  of  conflict  the  healthy  life  and 
growth  of  the  Church  were  going  on.  In  1842  began  the 
long  and  powerful  rectorship  of  the  Rev.  Dr.  Alexander  H. 
Vinton  at  St.  Paul's  Chm-ch.  For  seventeen  years  his  min- 
istry there  gave  noble  dignity  to  the  life  of  the  Church  in 
Boston,  and  was  a  source  of  vast  good  to  many  souls. 
His  work  may  be  considered  as  having  done  more  tlian 
that  of  any  other  man  who  ever  preached  in  Boston  to 
bring  the  Episcopal  Church  into  the  understanding,  the 
sympathy,  aud  the  respect  of  the  j)eople.  His  vigorous 
miiid  and  great  aequii'ements  and  commanding  character 
and  earnest  eloquence  made  him  a  most  influential  power 
in  the  city  and  the  Church.  He  was  met  as  he  first  came 
to  St.  Paul's  liy  a  deep  religious  interest,  which  was  only 
the  promise  of  the  profound  spiritual  life  which  will  al- 
ways make  the  years  of  his  ministry  here  memorable  and 
sacred.  He  remained  in  Boston  until  1858,  when  he 
removed  to  Philadelphia ;  but  in  later  life,  in  1869,  he 
returned  to  his  old  home,  and  was  rector  of  Emmanuel 
Church  till  December,  1877.  As  these  pages  are  being- 
written  he  has  just  passed  away,  lea\dng  a  memoiy  which 
Avill  be  a  perpetual  treasure  to  the  Church.  He  died  in 
Philadelphia  on  April  26,  1881. 

In  1843  the  growth  of  the  city  southward  toward  the 
Neck  was  marked  by  the  organization  of  the  new  Church 
of  the  Messiah  in  Florence  Street,  which,  under  the  min- 
istry of  the  Rev,  George  M.  Randall,  sprang  at  once  to 
useful  life.     The  parish  worshiped  for  a  while  in  a  haU  at 


A   CENTURY  OF  CHURCH  GROWTH  IX  BOSTON.     139 

the  corner  of  Washington  and  Common  Streets.  The 
corner-stone  of  the  new  church  was  laid  November  10, 
1847,  and  the  church  was  consecrated  August  29,  1848. 
In  1843  the  mission  work  of  the  Rev.  E.  M.  P.  Wells,  which 
afterward  became  so  well  known,  and  which  was  never 
wholly  abandoned  till  his  death,  began  at  what  was  called 
Trinity  Hall,  in  Summer  Street.  About  the  same  time 
the  Rev.  J.  P.  Robinson  began  a  mission  for  sailors  in 
Ann  Street,  which  for  many  years  excited  the  interest  and 
elicited  the  generosity  of  the  Episcopalians  of  Boston,  and 
which  still  survives  in  what  is  called  the  Free  Church  of 
St.  Mary,  for  sailors,  in  Richmond  Street.  In  1846  an  in- 
dividual act  of  Christian  generosity  provided  the  building 
of  St.  Stephen's  Chapel  in  Purcliase  Street,  the  gift  of  Mr. 
William  Appleton,  where  Dr.  Wells  labored  in  loving  and 
humble  sympathy  and  companionship  wdtli  the  poor  until, 
on  the  terrible  night  of  November  9,  1872,  the  great  fire 
swept  his  church  and  house  away.  He  was  a  remarkable 
man,  with  a  genius  for  charitj^  and  a  childlike  love  for 
God. 

Meanwhile  a  parish  was  slowly  growing  into  life  in  the 
populous  district  of  East  Boston.  St.  John's  Cluu-ch  was 
organized  there  in  1845.  After  many  disappointments 
and  disasters  it  finished  and  occupied  its  house  of  worship 
in  1852.  In  1849  St.  Mary's  Church  in  Dorchester  was 
added  to  the  number  of  suburban  churches.  In  1851  St. 
Mark's  Church,  at  the  South  End,  finds  its  first  mention 
in  the  record  of  the  acceptance  of  its  rectorship  by  the 
Rev.  P.  H.  Clreenleaf,  who  had  just  resigned  the  charge 
of  St.  John's  Church  in  Charlestown.  The  next  year  this 
new  church  bought  for  itself  a  cliurch  building,  which  it 
afterward  removed  to  Newton  Street,  and  in  which  it  is 
still  worshiping.  In  1856  the  Rev.  Dr.  Thomas  R.  Lambert 
T)egnu  his  ministrj'  in  Charlestown,  and  the  Rev.  William 
R.  Babcock  came  to  Jamaica  Plain,  succeeded  in  1876  by 


140  ASSAYS  AXI)  ADDRESSES. 

the  Rev.  S.  U.  Shearman.  In  1868  Bishop  Eastbnrn  re- 
signed the  rectorsliip  of  Trinity,  and  was  succeeded  in 
1869  by  the  Rev.  PhdUps  Brooks.  In  1860  the  Rev.  Dr. 
William  R.  Nicholson  became  rector  of  St.  Paul's  Church, 
and  the  Rev.  George  S.  Converse  of  St.  James's. 

These  were  years  fuU  of  life — a  life  which,  if  it  some- 
times became  restless  and  controversial,  flowed  for  the 
most  part  in  a  steady  stream  of  zealous  and  ever- widening 
work.  The  traditions  wliich  had  bound  the  Chm'cli  almost 
exclusively  to  the  rich  and  cultivated  were  cast  aside.  It 
had  accepted  its  mission  to  all  classes  and  conditions  of 
men.  The  number  of  communicants  increased.  In  1847 
there  were  about  two  thousand  in  the  churches  of  what 
then  was  Boston,  and  men  whom  the  city  knew  and  felt 
and  honored  were  preaching  in  the  Episcopal  pulpits. 

With  the  year  1860  begins  the  latest  period  of  our  his- 
tory. A  new  Boston  Avas  growing  up  on  the  Back  Bay ; 
the  country  was  just  entering  on  the  great  struggle  with 
rebellion  and  slavery ;  and  the  fixed  lines  of  theological 
thought  were  being  largely  broken  through.  All  of  these 
changes  were  felt  in  the  fortunes  of  the  Episcopal  Church 
in  Boston.  On  March  17,  1860,  a  meeting  of  those  who 
were  desirous  of  forming  a  new  Episcopal  church  west  of 
the  Public  Garden  was  held  at  the  residence  of  Mr.  William 
R.  Lawrence,  98  Beacon  Street.  The  result  of  this  meet- 
ing, and  the  others  to  which  it  led,  was  the  organization 
of  Emmanuel  Church,  and  the  erection  of  its  house  of 
worship  in  Newbui-y  Street,  which  was  consecrated  April 
24,  1862.  The  parish  held  its  services,  before  its  church 
building  was  finished,  in  Mechanics'  Hall,  at  the  corner  of 
Bedford  and  Chauncy  Streets.  Of  this  parish  the  first 
rector  was  the  Rev.  Dr.  Frederick  D.  Huntington,  who 
had  long  been  honoralily  known  in  Boston,  first  as  the 
minister  of  the  South  Congregational  Church,  in  the  Uni- 
tarian denomination,  and  afterward  as  the  Plunnner  Pro- 


A  CEXTUBY  OF  CHUBCH  GROWTH  IX  BOSTON.      141 

fessor  of  Christian  Morals  and  Preacher  to  the  University 
of  Cambridge.  It  was  in  view  of  his  leaving  his  Unitarian 
associations  and  seeking  orders  in  the  Episcopal  Chnreli, 
and  in  expectation  of  his  becoming  its  rector,  that  the 
parish  of  Emmannel  Chnrch  was  organized.  Dr.  Hunting- 
ton was  ordained  deacon  in  Trinity  Church,  on  Wednes- 
day, September  12, 1860,  Bishop  Burgess  of  Maine  preach- 
ing the  sermon.  On  the  next  Sunday  he  took  charge  of 
his  new  congregation,  and  his  ministry  from  that  time 
until  he  was  made  bishop  of  the  diocese  of  Central  New 
York,  in  18G9,  was  one  of  the  most  powerful  influences 
which  the  Episcopal  Church  has  ever  exercised  in  Boston. 
Under  his  care  Emmannel  Chni'ch  became  at  once  a  strong 
parish,  and  soon  put  forth  its  strength  in  missionary 
work.  It  founded  in  1863  a  mission  chapel  in  the  ninth 
ward,  from  Avhich  came  by  and  by  the  Chapel  of  the  Good 
Shepherd,  which  now,  with  its  pleasant  building  in  Cortes 
Street,  is  an  independent  and  useful  parish  church.  In 
1860  St.  Matthew's  Church  in  South  Boston,  which  had 
for  twenty-two  years  enjoyed  the  wise  and  gracious  min- 
istry of  the  Rev.  Dr.  Joseph  H.  Clinch,  was  left  without  a 
rector,  by  his  resignation ;  and  in  1861  the  Rev.  Dr.  J.  I.  T. 
Coolidge  was  chosen  to  supply  his  place.  Dr.  Coolidge, 
like  Dr.  Huntington,  had  been  a  Unitarian  minister,  and 
had  onlj'  a  short  time  before  received  ordination  in  the 
Episcopal  -Church. 

In  1861  St.  James's  Church,  Roxbury,  estal)lished  a  mis- 
sion chapel  on  Tremont  Street,  which,  under  the  charge 
of  the  Rev.  Mr.  Converse,  became  a  few  years  later  an  in- 
dependent parish  named  St.  John's.  In  1877  St.  James's 
Church,  now  under  the  ministry  of  the  Rev.  Percy  Browne, 
again  manifested  its  energetic  life  by  the  establishment 
of  another  mission  chapel,  in  Cottage  Street,  in  Dorches- 
ter, which  is  called  St.  Anne's  Chapel.  In  1867  St.  Mary's 
Church  in  Dorchester  began  a  mission  in  Milton  Lower 


142  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

Mills,  wliicli  lias  grown  into  a  distinct  parish,  bearing  the 
name  of  All  Saints.  In  1875,  after  Dr.  Vinton  had  snc- 
ceeded  Dr.  Hnntington  as  rector  of  Emmanuel  Church, 
his  assistant,  the  Rev.  B.  B.  Killikelly,  founded  a  mission 
at  the  West  End  of  Boston,  which,  bearing  the  name  of 
the  Free  Church  of  the  Evangelists,  is  now  under  the  care 
of  Trinity  Church.  In  1875  a  mission  at  City  Point  was 
organized  l^y  the  Rev.  John  Wright,  rector  of  St.  Matthew's 
Church.  In  1873  a  new  mission  grew  up  in  the  part  of 
South  Boston  called  Washington  Village,  which  is  known 
as  Grace  Chapel,  under  the  charge  of  the  Board  of  City 
Missions. 

All  these  are  signs  of  life  and  energy.  Only  once  has 
a  parish  ceased  to  be.  In  18G2  the  Rev.  Dr.  Charles  Ma- 
son, rector  of  Grace  Church,  died.  He  has  left  a  record 
of  the  greatest  purity  of  life  and  faithfulness  in  work. 
After  his  death  the  parish  of  Grace  Church  became  so 
feeble  that  at  last  its  life  departed.  Its  final  report  was 
made  in  1865.  Grace  Church  had  been  in  existence  almost 
forty  years. 

These  last  years  also  have  seen  great  changes  in  the 
personal  leadership  of  the  parishes  and  of  the  Church. 
Bishop  Eastburn  died  September  12,  1872,  after  an  epis- 
copate of  thirty  years ;  and  his  successor,  the  Rev.  Dr. 
Benjamin  Henry  Paddock,  was  consecrated  in  Grace 
Church,  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.,  on  September  17,  1873.  After 
Dr.  Randall  was  made  Bishop  of  Colorado,  in  1865,  the 
Rev.  Pelham  Williams  became  rector  of  the  Chiu'ch  of 
the  Messiah,  and  he  was  succeeded  in  1877  by  the  Rev. 
Henry  F.  Allen.  In  1877  Dr.  Vinton  gave  up  the  rector- 
ship of  Emmanuel  Church,  and  in  1878  the  Rev.  Leighton 
Parks  became  his  successor.  The  Rev.  Henry  Burroughs 
became  the  rector  of  the  venerable  Christ  Church  in  1868, 
and  the  Rev.  WiUiam  Wilberforce  Newton  succeeded  the 


A  CEXTUnT  OF  CHUIiCH  GBOWTH  IX  BOSTOX.      143 

Rev.  Treadwell  Waldeii  as  rector  of  St.  Paul's  Cliiircli  in 
1877,  followed  in  1883  by  the  Rev.  Dr.  F.  Courtney. 

Very  gradually,  and  hy  imjjereeptible  degrees,  tlie  par- 
ishes of  Boston  have  changed  their  character  during  this 
hundred  years  "vvhich  we  have  been  surveying.  Their 
churches  have  ceased  to  be  mere  places  of  worship  for  the 
little  groups  which  had  combined  to  build  them,  preserv- 
ing carefully  the  chartered  privileges  of  their  parishioners. 
They  have  aspired  to  become  religious  homes  for  the  com- 
munity, and  centers  of  religious  work  for  the  help  of  all 
kinds  of  suffering  and  need.  Many  of  the  churches  are 
free,  opening  their  pews  W'ithout  discrimination  to  all  who 
choose  to  come.  Those  which  are  not  technically  free  are 
eager  to  welcome  the  people.  In  places  which  the  influ- 
ence of  the  parish  churches  cannot  reach,  local  chapels 
have  been  freel}^  built. 

Besides  the  parish  life  of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Bos- 
ton, and  the  institutions  which  have  grown  up  under  dis- 
tinctively parochial  control,  the  general  educational  and 
charitable  institutions  of  the  Church  should  not  be  left 
unmentioned.  For  many  years  the  project  of  estabhshing 
a  Divinity  School  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Clnu'ch  at 
Boston  had  been  from  time  to  time  recm-ring.  In  1867  a 
very  generous  gift  of  Mr.  Benjamin  Tyler  Reed  secured 
wdiat  has  so  long  been  wanted ;  and  the  Episcopal  Divin- 
ity School  of  Cambridge  was  founded  on  a  strong  basis, 
which  insures  its  perj)etuity.  Since  that  time  other  liberal 
gifts  have  increased  its  equipment,  and  it  is  now^  one  of 
the  best  pro\dded  theological  schools  in  the  countr}'. 

The  Church  Home  for  Orphans  and  Destitute  Children, 
which  is  now  situated  at  South  Boston,  was  founded  in 
1855  by  the  Rev.  Charles  Mason,  who  w^as  then  rector  of 
Grace  Church.  St.  Luke's  Home  for  Convalescents,  which 
has  its  house  in  the  Highlands,  was  established  originally 


144  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

as  a  j^arisli  charity  of  tlie  Church  of  the  Messiah,  during 
the  ministry  of  the  Rev.  D.  Pelham  Williams,  hut  it  is  now 
an  institution  of  the  Church  at  large. 

The  great  fire  of  November  9  and  10,  1872,  destroyed 
two  of  the  Episcopal  churches  of  Boston :  Trinity  Church, 
in  Summer  Street,  and  St.  Stephen's  Chapel,  in  Purchase 
Street.  St.  Stephen's  has  not  yet  been  rebuilt.  Trinity 
had  already  begun  the  preparations  for  a  new  church 
before  the  fire,  and  the  new  buildings  on  Huntington 
Avenue  Avere  consecrated  on  Friday,  February  9, 1877,  by 
Bishop  Paddock,  the  consecration  sermon  being  2:)reaclied 
by  the  Rev.  Dr.  Vinton,  then  rector  of  Emmanuel  Church. 

These  are  the  principal  events  which  have  marked  the 
history  of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Boston  during  tliis  last 
period  of  the  century.  There  are  within  the  present  city 
limits  22  churches  and  chapels,  with  5675  communicants, 
and  4249  scholars  in  their  Sunday-schools. 

And  these  last  twenty  years  have  been  full  of  life  and 
movement  in  theological  thought.  The  Tractarian  Re- 
vival of  1845  has  passed  into  its  more  distinctively  ritual- 
istic stage ;  and  the  broader  theology,  which  also  had  its 
masters  in  England,  in  such  men  as  Dr.  Arnold  and  the 
Rev.  Frederick  D.  Maurice,  has  likewise  had  its  clear  and 
powerful  effect  upon  the  Episcopal  Church  in  Boston.  A 
lofty  belief  in  man's  spiritual  possibilities,  a  large  hope 
for  man's  eternal  destinies,  a  desire  for  the  careful  and 
critical  study  of  the  Bible,  and  an  earnest  insistence  upon 
the  comprehensive  character  of  the  Church  of  Christ — 
these  are  the  characteristics  of  much  of  the  most  zealous 
pulpit  teaching  and  parish  life  of  these  later  days. 


ADDRESS  AT  THE  COMMEMORATION  OF  THE 
SEVENTY-FIFTH  ANNIVERSARY  OF  AMERI- 
CAN BOARD  OF  COMMISSIONERS  FOR  FOR- 
EIGN   MISSIONS. 

(Boston,  Mass.,  October  14,  1885.) 

I  BRING  to  3^011,  sir,  and  to  this  meeting,  the  cordial, 
respectful,  affectionate,  and  g-ratefnl  greeting-  of  the  Board 
of  Foreign  Missions  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church. 
I  am  sorry  it  should  have  fallen  to  my  lot  to  bring  this 
greeting,  but  only  because  I  should  far  rather  it  would 
have  been  brought  by  one  who  officially,  and  in  full  spirit 
as  well,  represents  the  missionary  enterprises  of  the  Chu)*ch 
to  which  both  he  and  I  belong.  Let  me  say,  then,  at  the 
very  outset,  that  the  Board  of  Missions  of  oiu'  Church, 
which  has  its  central  sitting  in  New  York,  especially  in- 
vited Bishop  Paddock,  the  bislioj)  of  this  diocese,  who  by 
the  very  fact  of  his  being  the  bishop  of  this  diocese  is  a 
member  of  the  Board,  to  be  the  bearer  of  the  congratula- 
tions of  the  Board  and  of  the  Church  which  he  and  I  rep- 
resent, to  this  convention.  And  I  know  how  earnestly 
Bishop  Paddock  desired  he  might  do  so,  and  how  abso- 
lutely impossible  he  found  it,  owing  to  engagements  which 
he  could  not  break.  I  appear,  therefore,  at  his  request, 
to  speak,  not  for  myself,  but  for  him  and  for  our  Board 
and  for  our  Church. 

And  how  shall  I  bid  this  convention  such  a  gi-eeting  as 
our  Church  would  like  to  bid  ?  I  said  I  wanted  to  bid  it 
a  cordial  and  affectionate  and  respectful  and  a  grateful 
greeting.     And  it  is  a  feeling  of  gratitude,  my  friends, 

145 


14G  ESSAYS  JlXD   ADDEESSES. 

that  must  predominate  in  the  soul  of  any  one  who  brings 
a  greeting  from  the  body  lie  represents  to  snch  a  body  as 
this,  which  represents  the  whole  hf  e-work  of  the  American 
Board  of  Commissioners  for  Foreign  Missions.  I  donbt 
not,  if  I  could  unfold  the  history  of  many  of  oin-  Epis- 
copal missionaries,  those  who  have  acted  as  the  represen- 
tatives of  our  Church  chndng  the  last  foi'ty  or  fifty  years, 
I  should  find  in  their  personal  history  the  inspiration 
which  has  come  from  the  work  this  Board  has  done,  and 
from  the  lives  of  the  missionaries  this  Board  has  sent 
forth.  I  doubt  not  that,  if  I  had  come  prepared  with  a 
history  of  our  Board  and  its  statistics,  I  should  present  a 
story  which  would  at  every  point  be  suggestive  of  the 
inspiration  which  has  been  given  to  it  by  the  zeal  and  the 
work  of  the  American  Board. 

I  cannot  but  feel  that  while  one  speaks  as  a  representa- 
tive of  his  own  Church,  and  does  most  earnestly  bring 
tlie  greeting  of  that  Church,  and  desires  to  have  it  under- 
stood tliat  throughout  the  length  and  the  breadth  of  that 
Church  there  is  most  grateful  greeting  for  the  work  your 
Board  has  done,  yet  when  these  two  Boards  meet  as  we 
do  now,  through  you  in  your  organized  meeting  and 
through  me  as  a  representative  of  our  Board,  we  should 
greet  each  other  with  sympathy  and  kindness  as  members 
of  a  connnon  order,  all  animated  with  a  common  purpose. 
I  speak,  therefore,  not  merely  for  the  Episcopal  Church, 
but  I  speak  for  American  Christianity  when  I  declare  the 
profound  gratitude  we  all  feel  for  the  American  Board 
and  the  work  it  has  done  through  all  these  years. 

The  American  Board  was  the  first,  and  must  forever 
stand  in  history  as  having  been  the  first,  organized  body 
in  this  country  that  broke  the  bonds  of  the  self-contained 
religion  and  emerged  from  the  mists  that  enveloped 
American  Christianity  and  looked  abroad  and  saw  the 
world  as  the  field.     It  was  an  inevitable  necessity,  as  any 


AMERICAN  BOAIiD   FOB   FOREIGN  MISSIONS.       147 

one  who  reads  our  history  can  see,  that  at  the  first  we 
should  have  beeii  especially  devoted  to  the  estabhshmg 
of  the  Christian  work  and  the  spreading  of  the  gosj)el  in 
our  own  land.  But  any  one  looking  from  above  upon 
what  was  happening  and  was  going  to  happen  in  America 
must  have  waited  expectantly  for  the  day  when  American 
Christian  enterprise  would  reach  abroad  and  would  not 
be  satisfied  with  staying  at  home.  The  body  that  did  first 
thus  look  abroad  and  see  the  world  waiting  for  the  call  to 
foreign  missionary  work  that  Christianity  in  America 
could  not  always  fail  to  hear,  must  always  deserve  the 
profound  respect  and  gratitude  of  those  who  come  after. 
Let  Christian  missions  grow  to  be  what  they  will ;  let  them 
depart  ever  so  far  from  tlie  lines  of  work  which  were  laid 
out  at  the  organization  of  the  American  Board ;  let  them 
go  as  far  as  they  will  into  lauds  which  the  American 
Board  never  contemplated  entering  upon — no  missionary 
will  ever  go  forth  from  America  who  will  not  go  in  the 
track  that  your  organization  has  marked  out.  We  know 
well  enough  that  the  day  must  have  come,  if  the  churches 
which  established  this  Board  had  not  been  faithful  to  their 
diity,  when  American  churches  would  have  heard  the  call 
and  been  aroused  by  the  irrepressible  spiiit  of  their  love 
for  their  Master  to  have  entered  this  field  of  foreign  mis- 
sionary work.  But  that  Board  which  did  it  stands  forever 
entitled  to  receive  the  profound  gratitude  of  all  who  care 
for  missions.  This  is  one  cause  of  the  gratitude  which  I 
bring  you. 

Shall  I  not  say,  also,  that  there  is  a  profound  ground 
of  gratitude  here  that  you  have  during  these  seventy-five 
years — three  quarters  of  a  century — borne  wonderful  wit- 
ness to  the  power  of  the  Christian  faith  ?  Yoii  have  set 
forth  before  the  people  of  this  country  and  of  the  world 
the  power  that  belongs  to  earnest,  determined,  and  conse- 
crated effort  blessed  of  God.     And  I  believe  the  work  of 


148  ESSAYS  AND  ADDIii:SSES. 

this  Board  of  Missions  has  been  an  inspiration  to  the 
country  in  a  great  deal  else  besides  missionary  work. 
That  there  should  be  in  this  country  any  body  of  men 
wlio  would  declare  their  profound  faith  in  the  unseen  and 
eternal  Spirit,  and  who  would  declare  their  faith  by  sucli 
personal  consecration,  scattering  their  members  all  over 
the  world  and  pouring  forth  the  means  of  those  vrho 
staj'ed  at  home  like  a  very  river  of  plenteousness,  tliat 
must  have  had  a  powerful  influence,  that  has  had  a  power- 
ful influence  outside  of  missions,  outside  of  the  Church, 
outside  of  professed  Christianit}'.  The  work  that  you 
have  done  for  spiritual  life  and  in  showing  the  reality  of 
spiritual  things  deserves  and  receives  the  profoundest 
personal  gratitude  of  all  those  who  care  for  such  things. 

Shall  I  say,  again,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  testimony 
that  an  organization  such  as  this  has  borne  in  seventy- 
five  years  of  its  history  to  the  essential  connection  of  the 
idea  of  missions  with  active  Christianity  deserves  our 
grateful  recognition?  We  have  seen  during  all  these 
years  a  deepening  of  the  religious  thought  of  our  people. 
We  have  seen  God  lead  us  into  those  broad  fields  of  specu- 
lation where  we  once  thought  it  was  unwise  or  unsafe  to 
go.  We  have  seen  the  books  of  criticism  opened  and  ex- 
amined freely.  We  have  seen  those  things  which  seemed 
essential  to  Christianity  again  and  again  shown  to  be  only 
incidental  to  Christianity.  We  have  seen  how  al)Solutely 
simple  essential  Cln-istianity  is.  The  Church  has  not 
merely  continued  to  send  forth  her  missionaries,  but  the 
more  her  field  has  been  widened  the  more  her  spuituality 
has  increased ;  the  more  boldly  she  has  faced  every  truth 
that  God  has  declared  to  her,  so  much  the  more  has  the 
missionary  spirit  thriven,  so  mucli  the  more  and  more  tlie 
Church  has  thriven,  and  the  more  zealous  have  been  its 
members  to  send  the  truth  to  all  their  brethren  through- 
out the  world.  When  we  anticipate  the  ever-broaden- 
ing and  ever-simplifying  Christianity,  when  we  think  how 


AMEEICAX  BOARD   FOR   FOREIGX  MLSSIOXS.       149 

many  tilings  which  have  been  regarded  as  essential  have 
been  bnt  incidental,  shall  we  not  anticipate  without  fear 
that  the  more  Christianity  becomes  simplified  and  better 
known,  the  more  Chiistianity  becomes  Clu'ist,  and  Chris- 
tian living  becomes  simply  and  purely  the  folloAving  of 
Christ,  that  the  missionary  spiiit  shall  grow  and  grow, 
develop  and  extend,  until  in  the  progress  of  the  simplify- 
ing of  the  Christian  faith  shall  at  last  come  the  conversion 
of  the  world  ? 

These  thoughts  are  general  thoughts  which  are  sug- 
gested in  my  mind  as  I  find  m^^self  privileged  to  bring  the 
greeting  of  one  Chi-istian  body  unto  another.  And,  my 
brethren,  that  is  a  very  sacred  and  serious  thing  to  do. 
Let  me  close  what  I  have  to  sa}'  with  this  thought :  We 
thank  you  for  all  these  reasons  which  I  have  mentioned, 
but  the  real  root  of  our  gi'atitude  is  in  something  simpler 
than  all  these — it  is  because  we  are  all  brethren  in  Christ. 
We  know  that  all  men  are  God's  childi'en ;  that  the  most 
neglected  and  degi*aded  creature  in  this  world  is  a  child 
of  God ;  that,  therefore,  we  are  brethren  of  every  one  of 
God's  creatures  on  every  highest  mountain  and  in  every 
deepest  valley,  and  in  the  farthest  island  of  the  sea.  And 
because  you  have  reached  thousands  upon  thousands  of 
these  our  brethren,  and  given  them  the  message  which 
has  been  their  salvation,  we  thank  you.  For  every  poor 
heathen  that  you  have  converted,  for  every  soul  that  you 
have  led  back  to  the  Father  of  all  our  souls,  for  every 
darkness  into  which  you  have  pom-ed  any  hght,  because 
that  darkness  was  our  darkness,  because  our  Christianity 
was  incomplete  while  those  dark  places  existed,  and  be- 
cause they  were  om'  brethren  to  whom  you  told  the  story 
of  salvation,  we  thank  you.  For  all  these  causes  of  thank- 
fulness, as  well  as  many  others  which  I  might  enumerate, 
I  bring  you  the  cordial  and  respectful  and  affectionate 
and  grateful  greeting,  not  only  of  our  Board  of  Missions, 
but  of  the  whole  Episcopal  Church. 


THE  NEW   THEISM. 

(Clerieus  Club,  Boston,  Mass.,  April  5,  1886.) 

I  TAKE  this  title  "  The  New  Tlieism  "  because  it  seems  to 
imply  that  whatever  return  men  may  be  making  to  a  faith 
in  God  is  part  of  that  same  belief  in  Him  which  has  pos- 
sessed the  human  soul  in  all  its  generations.  The  words 
seem  to  express  the  double  notion  of  permanence  and 
change.  We  talk  of  '^  the  new  chemistry,"  and  we  want 
to  indicate  only  that  the  old  science  has  turned  a  new 
face  to  mankind  and  invited  men  to  her  secrets  by  novel 
ways.  We  talk  of  "  the  new  orthodoxy,"  and  we  mean 
that  the  old  conception  of  a  great  human  faith  has  ap- 
propriated to  itself  new  elements,  and  cast  itself  into  a 
new  form.  So  when  we  speak  of  any  present  religious 
conviction  or  tendency  as  a  new  theism,  the  expression  is 
meant  at  once  to  bind  the  present  to  the  past,  and  also  to 
set  its  face  toward  the  futm-e.  Theism  is  as  old  as  man, 
as  old  as  God.  The  new  theism,  then,  can  only  be  the 
reassertion  from  new  points  of  view,  and  after  momentary 
obscuration  of  denial,  of  that  conviction  of  God  which 
has  run  through  all  human  thought.  Solomon  brings 
into  the  new  temple  the  sacred  vessels  which  have  made 
the  old  tabernacle  holy.  They  stand  in  new  and  more 
splendid  places,  they  are  put  to  novel  and  richer  uses,  but 
they  are  the  same  vessels  still,  and  the  essential  sacredness 
which  is  in  them  is  not  altered. 

While  the  new  temple  was  being  built  and  before  the 
ark  and  the  consecrated  vessels  were  brought  into  it,  we 

150 


THE  NEW  THEISM.  151 

may  well  imagine  that  there  was  a  iDeriod  in  which  the 
thought  and  enthusiasm  of  the  people  of  Jerusalem  were 
concentrated  on  the  gorgeous  building  which  was  to  con- 
tain but  did  not  yet  contain  the  sacred  things,  and  that 
the  old  house  in  which  they  still  stood  was  more  or  less 
neglected.  So  while  a  new  system  of  thought  in  which 
the  truth  of  God  is  ultimately  to  be  enslii'ined  is  rising 
into  shape,  it  is  not  strange  that  men's  eyes  should  be 
fixed  absorbingly  on  it,  to  some  neglect  of  the  old  taber- 
nacle in  which  still  stands  the  certainty  of  Deity.  The 
time  comes  when  the  new  scheme  of  thought  and  know- 
ledge claims  for  itself  the  divine  consciousness  of  man, 
and  the  holiness  Avhich  belongs  to  all  times  or  to  no  time 
comes  in  to  give  richness  and  meaning  to  the  latest  struc- 
ture raised  b}'  the  intellect  of  man.  That  is  the  time  of 
a  new  theism. 

Such  a  time  seems  to  be  dawning  upon  us.  There  are 
indications  more  or  less  clear  that  the  scientific  and  philo- 
sophical systems  whose  stately  building  we  have  all  been 
watching  with  the  profoundest  interest  are  at  last  becom- 
ing ready  for  the  thouglit  of  God  and  are  beginning  to 
claim  it.  At  such  a  time  there  will  be  many  things  worth 
observing.  Both  those  who  have  always  kept  the  faith  of 
theism  and  those  who,  having  seemingly  departed  from  it 
for  a  while,  are  now  returning  to  it,  will  offer  some  curious 
phenomena.  On  the  one  hand,  the  new  theists  will  have 
a  disposition  to  talk  as  if  they  had  discovered  God,  per- 
haps almost  as  if  they  had  created  Him,  and  they  Mall 
take  the  old  theism  under  their  charge  with  a  somewhat 
irritating  condescension.  The  stream  which  has  departed 
from  the  main  current  and  returns  to  it  again  is  always 
fond  of  trying  to  look  as  if  it  were  the  main  cun-ent,  and 
the  i-eal  main  current  were  simply  a  side  stream  which 
ran  into  it.  So  the  new  theism  magnifies  the  aspects  of 
the  Deity  which  have  most  to  do  with  its  habits  of  thought 


152  JESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

as  if  they  were  the  essence  of  the  theistic  idea.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  curious  to  see  how  the  men  whose  belief 
in  God  never  has  been  sliaken  welcome  the  returning 
wanderers.  There  is  sometimes  a  shout  of  triumph,  a 
victorious  "  I  told  you  so,"  an  outburst  of  partisan  com- 
placency. Sometimes  there  is  a  smile  of  pity,  as  if  the 
whole  excursion  had  meant  nothing  but  mere  wilfulness, 
as  if  the  vagrants  were  returning,  having  rediscovered  the 
multiplication  table,  which  nobody  ought  ever  to  have 
doubted.  Sometimes  there  is  a  sigh  of  relief,  as  if  untold 
misgivings  in  their  own  hearts  were  quieted,  and  they 
could  once  more  go  to  sleep  in  peace  because  the  childi'en 
were  at  home. 

Surely  there  are  finer  and  more  reasonable  positions  for 
both  sides  to  take.  At  least  those  who  have  never  ceased 
to  be  theists  may  well  set  themselves  to  ask  what  those 
who  have  wandered  for  a  time  outside  of  theism  are  bring- 
ing back  with  them,  when  they  come  for  the  enrichment 
of  the  theistic  faith  to  which  they  return.  My  friend  by 
my  side  becomes  an  unbeliever.  He  goes  perhaps  far 
away  out  of  my  sight.  He  lives  in  regions  of  thought 
into  which  I  as  a  believer  cannot  enter.  By  and  by  some 
morning  I  lift  up  my  eyes  and  see  him  coming  back.  I 
run  to  welcome  him.  But  will  not  my  first  question  be, 
as  he  enters  into  the  old  domain,  what  he  has  gathered 
since  he  went  away  which  shall  make  the  old  home  richer 
for  his  wanderings,  now  that  he  has  returned  ?  It  would 
seem  to  be  a  very  foolish  and  self-spiting  churlishness 
which  out  of  false  dignity  would  refuse  to  ask  that  ques- 
tion. Tom  Touchey,  in  the  Spectator,  who  "plagued  a 
couple  of  honest  gentlemen  so  long  for  a  trespass  in 
breaking  one  of  his  hedges  till  he  was  forced  to  sell  the 
groimd  it  inclosed  to  defray  the  charges  of  the  prosecu- 
tion," is  no  unfair  type  of  such  kind  of  refusal.  The  idea 
of  God  is  too  large  for  any  man  to  say  that  he  has  grasped 


THE  NEW  THEISM.  153 

it  all.  It  is  too  pervasive  for  any  region  of  thought  into 
which  honest  speculation  may  carry  a  man  to  be  fruitless 
of  some  characteristic  developments  of  it. 

There  are  indeed  some  experiences  in  which  the  return 
to  belief  seems  to  be  not  through  the  special  study  and 
knowledge  out  of  which  the  unbelief  has  come.  Take  the 
interesting  biography  of  Ellen  Watson,  the  disciple  of 
Clifford,  who,  after  giving  up  all  Christian  faith,  returned 
by  and  by  to  a  trust  in  God  and  a  life  of  devotion  which 
was  very  rich  and  beautiful.  I  suppose  the  fact  with  re- 
gard to  her  really  was  that  she  never  really  did  reject  the- 
ism, but  simply  seemed  for  a  time  to  find  her  hfe  full  and 
complete  without  it.  What  she  contributed  to  faith  then 
on  her  return  was  simply  a  new  testimony  to  the  old  truth 
that 

"  Nor  man  nor  natiu'e  satisfy 
Whom  only  God  created." 

But  other  books  bring  the  testimony  of  other  lives,  in 
which  the  new  theism  is  the  direct  issue  of  the  lines  of 
thought  in  which  the  thinker  first  departed  from  the 
Christian  faith.  There  are  two  such  books  in  our  own 
neighborhood  to  which  we  may  direct  our  observation : 
one  is  John  Fiske's  "  Idea  of  God  as  Affected  by  Modern 
Knowledge " ;  the  other  is  Francis  EllingAvood  Abbott's 
"  Scientific  Theism."  It  is  not  of  the  argument  of  those 
liooks  that  I  want  to  speak,  but  of  the  results  at  which 
they  finally  arrive.  Any  one  who  believes  in  spiritual 
processes  which  will  not  report  themselves  to  the  reason 
may  well  believe  that  underneath  the  science  of  the  one 
and  the  metaphysics  of  the  other  there  are  powers  at  work 
of  which  the  books  themselves  are  not  aware. 

But  it  is  the  results  to  which  the  books  come  that  are 
most  interesting.  The  results  of  the  two  books  are  sub- 
stantially the   same.      Both   totally  reject   materialism. 


17)4:  JiSSAYS  AXD   ABDBESSES. 

Both  are  vehement  against  Paley  and  the  old  argument 
from  design.  Yet  both  beheve  in  a  teleological  principle 
in  the  universe  more  subtle  and  more  impressive  than 
that  which  found  its  sufficient  illustration  in  the  mechan- 
ism of  a  watch.  Both  preach  the  immanence  of  the 
creative  and  regulative  power.  Both  hesitate  and  draw 
back  from  an  assertion  of  the  personality  of  Deitj^  and 
steady  themselves  by  vigorous  railings  against  anthropo- 
morphism. 

Some  books  get  their  interest  from  their  processes,  and 
you  do  not  care  for  their  conclusions.  The  value  of  other 
books  lies  in  their  conclusions,  and  their  processes  are  of 
small  account.  Of  this  latter  sort  of  books  is  Abbott's 
"  Scientific  Theism."  The  science  is  not  very  satisfying, 
but  the  theism  at  which  it  seems  to  arrive  is  well  worth 
our  stud}^  He  holds  the  universe  per  se  to  be  infinitely 
intelligible.  That  is  the  burden  of  his  argument — the 
noumenal  as  distinct  from  the  phenomenal  relation  of 
things  and  their  relations.  He  holds  that  the  intelligibil- 
ity of  the  universe  involves  the  intelligence  of  the  universe. 
And  so  he  asserts  that  the  universe  per  se  is  infinitely  in- 
telligent. He  puts  these  facts  together,  and  "the  third 
truth  follows  with  irresistible  certainty  that  the  universe 
per  se  is  an  infinite  self -consciousness."  We  can  hardly 
help  l:)eing  puzzled  here  and  wondering  whether,  in  spite 
of  all  his  previous  argument,  which  has  been  laboriously 
dragging  up  the  object  out  of  the  depths  of  the  subject, 
he  has  not  at  last  lost  his  hold  on  his  prize  and  seen  the 
object  once  more  disappear  in  the  subjective  depths;  but 
that  is  not  our  present  point.  We  are  not  dealing  with 
his  metaphysics.  Surely  the  result  at  Avhieh  he  finally 
arrives — the  universe  per  se  an  infinite  self-consciousness 
— delights  us  with  its  alnindance  of  vitality.  It  is  all 
alive.  It  has  entirely  escaped  from  the  death  of  material- 
ism.   It  is  fuU  of  meaning.    It  is  no  machine,  Fate,  Chance, 


THE  XEW   THEISM.  155 

and  Providence,  as  common^  depicted,  tlie  working  of  a 
far-off  power  on  a  foreign  stnff  through  the  long  arm  of 
law.  Here  stupid  explanations  disappear,  "  The  universe 
is  to  be  conceived,"  so  Abbott  writes,  "  as  an  organism  all 
of  whose  life  and  growth  are  strictly  immanent " — every- 
thing is  instinct  and  flung  wide  open  to  knowledge — "  the 
only  unknowable  is  the  non-existent,"  he  declares.  Is 
this  pantheism ?  "If  all  forms  of  monism  are  necessarily 
pantheism,  then  scientific  theism  is  necessarily  pantheism," 
he  says,  "for  it  certainly  holds  that  all  is  God  and  God  is 
all ;  but  if  pantheism  is  the  denial  of  all  real  j^ersonality, 
whether  finite  or  infinite,  then  most  emphatically  scientific 
theism  is  not  pantheism,  but  its  diametrical  opposite.  Tele- 
ology is  the  very  essence  of  purely  spiritual  personality. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  an  unconscious  teleology."  These 
are  strong  v/ords.  Their  disclaiming  of  impersonality  is  as 
complete  as  is  their  rejection  of  the  Personality  in  whose 
hands  the  universe  is  pictured  as  lying  by  the  ordinary 
religious  thought  of  men. 

The  other  book,  ^^dtli  many  differences  of  method,  comes 
to  the  same  result.  Fiske  pictures  the  result  to  which  by 
slow  evolution  we  have  arrived  as  "the  recognition  of  the 
eternal  God  indwelling  in  the  universe,  in  whom  we  live 
and  move  and  have  our  being."  What  is  this  but  the 
infinite  self-consciousness  of  the  universe  per  se,  on  the 
one  hand  not  inconsistent  with  absolute  monism,  and  on 
the  other  hand  capable  of  having  personality  attributed 
to  it  in  virtue  of  the  streaks  and  signs  of  purpose  which 
it  shows?  And  Fislce  connects  this  assertion  of  cosmic 
theism  as  distinct  from  anthropomoi-phic  theism  directly 
with  man's  renewed  intimacy  with  nature.  The  old  Augus- 
tinianism  has  caught  the  political  and  governmental  con- 
ceptions of  Rome.  We  Athanasians,  whether  in  the  old 
nature-worships  or  in  this  modern  cosmic  theism,  are 
drinkiuff  at  the  fountains  in  the  hills  or  readino:  the  nivs- 


156  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

teiy  of  the  stars  in  the  sky.  The  result  with  Fiske  again 
is  a  universe  quivering  with  energy.  "  The  infinite  and 
eternal  power  that  is  manifested  in  every  pulsation  of  the 
universe,"  he  declares,  "  is  none  other  than  the  living  God." 
A  "quasi-psychical  nature"  only  can  he  find  it  in  his 
thinking-power  to  attribute  to  this  Deit}',  but  the  life 
which  His  indwelling  gives  to  the  universe  is  felt  in 
every  recognition  of  His  presence,  every  utterance  of  His 
name. 

I  name  these  two  books  not  because  they  are  the  great- 
est and  the  best,  but  only  because  they  are  the  nearest 
and  the  most  familiar.  In  the  result  at  Avhich  they  arrive 
they  represent  well  enough  that  part  of  the  thought  of  the 
time  which  is  turning  its  face  toward  i;heism.  That  there 
is  such  a  turning  there  can  be  no  doubt.  What  John 
Fiske  tells  of  himself,  of  how  the  truth  that  man's  educa- 
tion is  the  final  cause  of  creation,  after  hovering  long  in 
the  background  of  his  consciousness  suddenly  flashed 
upon  him  two  years  ago  like  a  revelation,  has  been  true 
of  many  a  mind  in  relation  to  the  idea  of  God.  Here 
come  the  wanderers  back.  They  have  strayed  far.  They 
have  been  deep  into  tlie  darkness.  They  come  back  with 
earnest  faces,  not  remorseful,  not  regretful  for  their 
wanderings ;  ready,  no  doubt,  to  believe  that  it  was  God 
Himself  who  sent  them  into  the  wilderness  of  agnosti- 
cism, that  they  might  bring  back  thence  something  which 
shall  make  the  theism  more  true  and  rich  than  much  the- 
istic  thought  had  grown  to  be. 

What  is  it  that  they  bring  ?  In  one  word,  is  it  not  that 
which  we  have  found  bursting  forth  from  these  two  books  ? 
It  is  the  sense  of  the  liveness  of  the  universe.  If  the  be- 
lief in  the  personality  of  God  has  often  had  a  tendency  to 
separate  the  Governor  from  the  world,  to  segregat-e  vital- 
ity in  Him  and  leave  the  world  a  dead  machine,  is  it  not 
true  that  that  divine  truth  of  the  personality  needs  from 


THE  NEW  THEISM.  157 

time  to  time  to  be  batlied  and  refreshed  in  the  trnth  of 
universal  life  lest  it  become  too  hard  and  dry  ? 

The  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  is  a  protest  against  the  hard, 
tight  person aln ess  of  the  conception  of  God  which  thinks 
of  Him  as  a  big  individual,  with  definite  limits  to  His 
nature,  and  almost  to  a  visible  frame  in  which  He  lives. 
The  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  is  an  attempt  to  give  richness, 
variety,  mystery,  internal  relation,  abundance,  and  free- 
dom to  the  ideas  of  God.  Unitarianism  has  got  the  notion 
of  God  as  tight  and  individual  as  it  is  ])Ossible  to  make  it, 
and  is  dying  of  its  meager  Deity.  The  new  theism,  filled 
with  the  sense  of  a  divine  life  in  the  very  being  of  the 
universe,  furnishes  that  bath  of  a  great  general  concep- 
tion into  which  S23ecial  doctrine  must  now  and  then  be 
plunged  for  the  renewal  of  its  truth  and  freshness.  That 
the  Incarnation,  the  bringing  of  the  divine  idea  out  of  its 
distance  into  our  human  life,  so  rescued  and  refreshed 
that  idea,  every  Christian  Jew,  e^-ery  John  and  Andrew, 
must  have  known  in  his  existence.  In  the  same  way  upon 
a  different  side  the  truth  of  the  liveness  of  the  universe 
fulfils  for  us  the  trnth  of  God.  The  Incarnation  brought 
into  union  with  God's  supremacy  the  saeredness  of  man. 
There  may  be  a  yet  unreached  though  often  anticipated 
theism  which  shall  bring  into  union  with  God's  supremacy 
the  liveness  of  the  world. 

Of  course  we  ask  at  once  whether  this  is  mere  panthe- 
ism. In  the  midst  of  thoughts  like  these  what  becomes 
of  the  personality  of  God  ?  We  can  see  how  it  is  in  dan- 
ger of  being  drowned  and  lost.  We  can  see  how  it  often 
is  submerged.  The  new  theism  in  the  minds  of  many 
men  who  hold  it  is  nothing  but  old  pantheism.  Never- 
theless we  are  struck  by  seeing  how  those  who  teach  it 
are  eager  to  assert  that  it  is  not  pantheism.  The  more 
they  reject  the  personality  of  God  as  it  is  ordinarily  be- 
lieved, the  more  they  assert  that  God  is  personal  in  a 


158  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

sense  wliicli  seems  to  tliem  more  true.  "  Our  experience," 
says  Fiske,  "  does  not  furnish  the  idea  of  a  personality 
which  is  not  narrowly  hemmed  in  ])y  the  inexorable  bar- 
riers of  circumstance.  We  therefore  cannot  conceive  such 
an  idea.  But  it  does  not  follow  tliat  there  is  no  reality 
answering  to  what  such  an  idea  would  if  it  coidd  be  con- 
ceived." What  a  shrinking  from  the  pantheism  which 
seems  just  at  hand  is  in  these  words !  Surely  we  Chris- 
tians ought  to  understand  how  one  feels  who  sees  panthe- 
ism close  at  hand  and  yet  di-aws  back  from  it  and  will  not 
be  a  pantheist.  For  the  New  Testament  is  always  j  ust  on 
the  brink  of  pantheism,  and  is  oidy  saved  from  it  by  the 
intense  personality  of  Jesus  and  His  overwhelming  injunc- 
tion of  responsibihty.  Surely  He  gives  us  reason  to  be- 
lieve that  there  is  a  real  possibility  of  holding  both  to- 
gether, the  personality  of  God  and  the  divine  life  in  the 
universe. 

Nor  need  we  refuse  to  feel  the  help  of  a  true  anthropo- 
morphism because  anthropomorphic  representations  have 
been  so  often  false  and  crude.  The  noblest  of  earthly 
natures  must  alwa3^s  furnish  the  type  for  our  conception 
of  that  which  is  above  the  earthly.  Thought  will  always 
stand  upon  the  highest  hilltop  for  its  spring  into  the 
heavens.  The  Scripture  statement  that  man  is  made  in 
the  image  of  God  will  always  tempt  man's  soul  to  run 
back  along  the  line  of  creation  and  seek  to  know  the 
Pattern  by  the  copy.  At  least  man  will  always  feel  that 
to  seek  to  know  God  by  the  irratioual  parts  of  nature  and 
call  him  Force,  must  be  less  true  to  Him  and  worthy  of 
Him  than  to  seek  to  know  Him  b}^  the  higher  reasonable 
parts  of  nature  and  call  Him,  as  John  Fiske  hesitatingly 
calls  Him,  "Infinite  Personality,"  however  we  may  be 
aware  as  we  use  the  word  that  it  is  ovei-full  of  the  asso- 
ciations of  our  ordinary  manhood. 

Certainly  the  protest  against  anthropomorphism  must 


THE  NEW  THEISM.  159 

lead  us  to  this — to  a  deeper  study  of  wliat  the  manhood 
really  is  which  may  help  us  to  conceive  of  God.  It  must 
compel  us  to  throw  out  of  our  idea  of  man  those  things 
which  are  only  accidents  of  his  life  and  not  essential  parts 
of  it.  As  I  try  to  know  God  by  man,  I  may  become  aware 
that  all  the  tumult  of  passion,  all  the  meannesses  and 
jealousies  and  spites  and  torpidities  and  sins  are  intruders 
in  my  human  nature,  that  nothing  reall}^  belongs  to  the 
human  idea  except  that  whicli,  glorified  and  multiplied 
and  spiritualized,  may  be  lifted  up  and  thought  of  God. 

And  it  is  good  for  us  that  by  such  questions  as  the  new 
theism  is  full  of  the  whole  question  of  personality  should 
be  reojjened  in  men's  minds,  and  that  they  should  be  forced 
to  think  of  it  in  larger  ways  than  they  have  l>een  used  to 
apply  to  it.  It  has  grown  very  tight  and  selfish.  It  has 
partaken  of  the  littleness  of  the  individual  liuman  crea- 
ture. See,  for  instance,  how  hard  it  is  for  many  people 
to  form  any  real  conception  of  the  personality  of  man,  of 
an  intelligence  and  will  lielonging  to  the  whole  human 
race  inclusive  of  all  but  distinct  from  each  of  the  intelli- 
gences and  wiUs  of  men.  To  most  x^copl^  probably  the 
colossal  man,  the  aggregate  human  personality,  seems  to 
be  only  a  figure  of  speech.  And  yet  that  is  the  personal- 
ity, I  imagine,  from  which  a  true  anthropomorphism  must 
set  out  to  imagine  God.  The  man  which  is  made  in  the 
image  of  God  is  manhood.  Not  this  man  or  that  man 
save  as  he  is  an  utterance  of  the  universal  manhood.  Not 
this  man  or  that  man  with  his  partialness  and  fixed  sim- 
plicity, but  the  universal  manhood  with  its  nniltitudinous- 
ness,  its  self -related  and  various  internal  life,  its  movement 
and  ever-opening  vitality,  its  oneness  yet  its  multitude, 
its  multitude  within  its  oneness — that  is  the  man  which 
was  made  in  God's  image  and  by  whose  study  the  image 
of  God  may  dimly  open  again  upon  the  soul.  We  create 
first  an  artificial  simplicity  for  our  individual  life,  and  we 


IGO  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

assert  that  outy  in  sucli  an  individuality  as  that  is  there 
a  real  personality.  The  first  enlargement  of  such  a  nar- 
row conception  as  that  is  in  the  necessity  of  conceiving 
of  the  personality  of  man.  The  next  is  in  the  even  deeper 
necessity  of  conceiving  of  the  personality  of  God.  The 
new  theism  finds  itself  face  to  face  with  that  necessity.  It 
hesitates  about  the  i^ossibility  of  solving  the  difficulty  and 
reaching  the  conception  which  yet  it  sees  that  it  cannot 
do  without.  The  religion  of  the  New  Testament  stands 
ready  with  its  clear  utterance  of  that  divine  personality 
long  known  and  realized.  As  it  offers  to  the  new  theism 
the  definiteness  and  positiveness  of  its  Christ,  may  it  not 
hope  to  receive  again  from  it  something  of  the  largeness 
and  breadth  which  the  very  definiteness  of  its  Christhood 
is  always  in  danger  of  losing  f  In  the  seai-ch  for  the  '^  In- 
finite Personality  "  may  not  the  old  theism  give  to  the  new 
its  vividness  of  personal  beliefs,  and  may  not  the  new 
theism  give  to  the  old  its  realization  of  Infinity  ? 

There  are  times  when  you  want  to  loosen  men's  thought 
of  God  as  there  are  times  when  you  want  to  tighten  it. 
All  loosening  is  preparatory  to  a  better  tightening  by  and 
by ;  but  for  the  moment  it  is  a  loosening  and  not  a  tighten- 
ing that  you  want.  You  bid  a  child  open  his  hand  so  that 
he  may  get  a  better  hold.  Or  is  it  not  like  a  ship  that 
lies  frozen  in  a  sea  of  ice  ?  She  stands  solid  and  firm,  and 
is  in  no  danger  of  sinking.  In  the  spring  the  ice  begins 
to  melt,  and  the  ship  is  afraid.  The  hold  of  the  frozen 
water  upon  her  seems  to  be  giving  way.  But  "when  the 
melting  is  complete,  she  finds  herself  surrounded  and  held 
up  by  the  same  element,  only  now  unfrozen  and  offering 
her  not  only  safety,  but  the  chance  to  go  freely  on  her 
waj'.  So  is  man's  faith  in  the  personality  of  God  when 
it  has  been  allowed  to  come  into  free  relation  to  the 
liveness  of  the  universe  and  the  endless  mystery  of  the 
development  of  nature. 


THE  NEW   THEISM.  161 

And  so  have  we  not  reached  some  notion  of  the  direc- 
tion from  which  the  wanderer  will  return  from  his  wan- 
derings and  of  what  it  is  that  he  will  Ining-  with  him  when 
he  comes  ?  I  have  mentioned  two  books  merely  because 
they  seem  to  lie  very  naturally  in  our  way.  But  the  dis- 
position which  they  illustrate  is  not  confined  to  them,  nor 
is  it  to  be  read  only  in  the  fields  of  thought  to  which  those 
books  belong.  In  ethical  culture,  in  social  life,  in  the 
regions  of  mj'stical  and  psychical  research  as  well  as  in 
metaphysics  and  in  the  science  of  nature,  the  same  per- 
vading sense  of  tlie  vitality  of  the  universe  is  felt.  A 
new  sense  of  purpose,  a  deeper  teleology,  is  filling  the 
frame  of  life.  Effort  is  crowding  itself  upon  the  idea  of 
energj^,  and  God  more  than  force  is  becoming  the  word 
in  all  men's  lips. 

Is  it  not  true  that  with  such  a  retiu'n  of  the  tide  the 
pools  of  faith  which  have  been  standing  in  the  hollows  of 
the  rocks  must  be  filled  with  new  freshness  and  brought 
into  a  new  union  with  the  universal  sea  of  human  life  and 
thought?  The  thing  which  this  great  inflow  of  nature 
half  moralized  and  half  personalized  needs  is  to  attain  a 
complete  morality  b}'  which  alone  can  come  a  complete 
personality.  That  the  religion  of  the  ages  has  to  give. 
Its  continual  assertion  of  God  as  the  source  of  duty  must 
give  substantial  clearness  to  this  universe,  which  thus  far 
seems  in  the  new  theism  almost  to  reel  and  tremble  with 
the  intoxication  of  its  immanent  Deity.  The  word  of 
David  must  be  the  story  of  what  is  to  come :  "  He  com- 
manded, and  it  stood  fast."  When  that  has  come  may 
we  not  look  to  see  the  great  idea  of  God  made  no  less 
clear  and  yet  truly  infinite  ?  May  we  not  look  to  see  a 
Christ  in  whom  the  whole  need  of  all  the  living  world 
shall  find  their  satisfaction  f  May  we  not  look  to  see  a 
Church  which  shall  truly  express  the  meeting  of  the 
whole  of  manhood  with  the  whole  of  God  and  the  perfect 
satisfaction  of  the  human  and  tlie  di^'ine  ? 


ADDRESS  AT  THE  TWO  HUNDREDTH  COMMEM 

ORATION   OF  THE   FOUNDATION   OF  KING'S 

CHAPEL,  BOSTON,  MASS.,  DECEMBER  15,1886. 

During  the  past  seventeen  years  I  have  owed  a  great 
many  of  the  pleasures  which  I  have  enjoyed  to  my  con- 
nection with  Trinity  Church.  I  owe  the  privilege  of  be- 
ing here  to-day,  and  the  fact  that  I  am  the  rector  of  that 
church,  to  a  certain  scene  which  took  phice  on  a  bright 
April  morning  in  the  year  1734,  when  Mr.  Commissary 
Price,  who  was  then  rector  of  King's  Chapel,  went  down 
to  the  corner  of  Summer  Street  and  Bishop's  Alley  aiul 
laid  the  corner-stone  of  Trinity  Church.  One  year  after 
that  time,  at  the  same  place,  in  the  building  which  had 
been  erected  during  the  3'ear,  the  services  of  Trinity 
Church  were  inaugurated  by  a  service  held  and  a  sermon 
preached  by  the  same  Mr.  Commissary  Price ;  and  the  life 
of  the  new  church  at  once  began,  under  the  rectorship  of 
Rev.  Addington  Davenj^ort,  who  up  to  that  time  had  been 
in  some  way  associated  with  the  services  in  King's  Chapel, 
but  who  then  became  the  first  minister  of  Trinity  Churcli. 
And  so  our  histories  are  bound  together. 

Mr.  Davenport  is  now  to  us  a  very  dim  and  misty  per- 
son, but  everything  that  we  leai'u  of  him  is  altogether  to 
his  credit ;  and  he  gave  at  once  to  the  services  that  were 
held  at  Trinity  Church  and  to  that  new  parish  a  very  dig- 
nified and  honorable  position.  He  stands  to  us  now 
mainly  as  a  link  to  connect  the  lives  of  the  two  parishes, 
and  to  let  us  feel  that  we  belong  to  the  same  line  of 

162 


THE   FOUNDATION  OF  KING'S   CHAPEL.  163 

succession  to  wliich  the  parisliioners  of  King's  Chapel 
belong. 

When  one  has  a  happy  life,  he  feels  thankful  to  those  who 
gave  liini  a  chance  to  live  that  life.  And  when  a  parish 
has  lived  the  hapjDy  life  which  Trinity  Chui-ch  has  lived, 
while  trying  in  its  way  and  time  to  do  some  useful  work, 
it  is  thankful  to  those  who  gave  it  the  beginning  of  its 
existence  and  the  opportunity  to  do  that  work ;  and  so 
we  are  thankful  to  those  from  whom  you  sprang,  and 
from  whom  we  sprang,  that  they  founded  Trinity  Church 
in  that  year  1734. 

I  have  tried  to  think  what  is  the  real  relationship  be- 
tween the  King's  Chapel  of  to-day  and  the  Trinity  Church 
to  which  you  have  given  your  invitation.  It  is  not  easy 
to  fasten  it.  It  is  not  simply  that  you  are  the  mother- 
church  and  we  are  the  daughter-church.  It  is  something 
like  the  relation  which  has  come  to  exist  between  the  life 
of  our  own  country  and  the  life  of  the  England  across  the 
seas.  We  talk  in  a  pleasant  way  about  England  being 
the  mother-country  and  of  this  country  of  ours  being  the 
daughter-country ;  but  when  we  come  to  examine  this  and 
to  study  the  relationship,  we  find  that  we  have  not  stated 
it  exactly  as  it  is.  The  England  of  to-day  is  not  the 
mother  of  which  the  United  States  is  the  daughter.  The 
England  of  to-day  and  the  United  States  of  America  are 
sister-nations ;  and  the  mother  of  us  both  lies  two  cen- 
turies back — in  the  rich  life  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
out  of  which  we  and  so  much  of  the  best  of  English  life 
have  sprung.  England  is  the  daughter  Avho  has  remained 
at  home ;  we  are  the  daughter  who  has  gone  abroad.  We 
are  not  her  daughter,  and  she  is  not  oiu*  mother. 

So  it  is — is  it  not  ? — with  reference  to  the  relation  which 
exists  between  your  parish  and  the  parish  which  I  have 
the  pleasure  of  representing.  We  are  both  the  children 
of  that  peculiar  English  life — the   life   of  the   English 


104  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Churcli  transported  to  tliis  land  and  planted  here — which 
has  been  so  fehcitously  described  to  us  this  afternoon. 
You  are  daughters  of  that  history ;  we  are  daughters  of 
that  history,  not  of  a  daughter-parish. 

Let  us  look  for  a  moment  on  the  face  of  our  mother. 
She  does  not  shine  in  the  history  of  America.  The  at- 
tempt to  establish  the  English  Church  in  the  colony  of 
Massachusetts  in  those  older  days  w^as  not  a  successful, 
happy,  nor  shining  part  of  our  history ;  and  yet  I  am  sure 
that  there  was  something  that  passed  from  it  into  the 
mental,  ecclesiastical,  social,  and  perhaps  even  the  politi- 
cal life  of  America  which  it  would  be  a  pity  to  have  lost. 
Our  mother,  the  English  Church,  trying  to  establish  her- 
self in  the  colonies,  came  somewhat  awkwardly,  as  might 
have  been  expected.  She  tried  to  plant  herself  in  the 
midst  of  an  antagonism  that  made  her  awkward  and  un- 
graceful in  her  coming.  But  she  did  bring  with  her 
sometliing  of  that  profound  reverence  for  the  past,  some- 
thing of  that  deep  sense  of  religions  order,  something 
which  she  had  clung  to  as  the  true  form  of  devotion,  some- 
thing which  had  all  the  respectability  of  form  and  com- 
munion which  characterized  the  life  of  the  English  Church 
tln'oughout  her  history  and  experience  in  the  old  land. 
The  trouble  was  that  she  came  and  remained  a  foreigner ; 
and  just  as  soon  as  the  foreigner  was  no  longer  to  be 
tolerated,  she  passed  out  of  the  life  which  had  been  grad- 
ually acquiring  its  own  national  character.  The  beauty 
of  her  life  was  that  these  two  children  she  left  behind 
— King's  Chapel  and  Trinity  Church — were  thorouglily 
American,  in  spite  of  her  old  associations  and  her  un- 
fortunate life  in  a  foreign  land.  She  stamped  upon  those 
two  congregations  a  distinctively  American  character.  I 
do  not  learn — though  those  who  are  wiser  than  I  am  may 
correct  me — that  the  congregation  of  King's  Chapel  was 
largely  broken  up  by  that  exodus  in  which  the  rector  of 


THE  FOUNDATION  OF  KING'S   CHAPEL.  165 

King's  Chapel  departed,  carrying  so  mueli  with  him  that 
was  representative  of  her  history.  Certainly  the  body  of 
the  congregation  remained,  and  perpetuated  the  life  which 
has  residted  in  the  history  whicli  has  come  from  that  day 
to  this.  And  1  do  feel  proud  that  the  congregation  of 
Trinity  was  the  only  congregation  of  the  Ej)iscopal  Church 
anywhere  in  this  neighborhood  which  did  so  deeply  retain 
association  with  the  life  of  the  colonies  and  the  cause  with 
which  they  were  identified  that  she  had  their  spirit  of  in- 
dependence, that  she  preserved  her  service  throughout  the 
whole  of  the  Revolutionary  War,  and  that  she  formed  the 
nucleus  around  which  the  life  of  the  Episcopal  Church  was 
gathered  after  the  war  had  closed. 

So  our  mother  the  English  Church  at  least  succeeded  in 
this,  that  she  made  others  American,  if  she  did  not  become 
American  herself.  She  succeeded  in  inspiring  that  spirit 
which  must  always  be  cherished — that  while  the  great 
Christian  faith  is  one  everywhere  throughout  the  world, 
it  is  one  part  of  Christian  duty,  and  must  be  one  element 
of  a  church's  successful  life,  to  identify  herself  with  the 
national  life  in  the  midst  of  which  she  lives;  that  she 
shall  sympathize  with  every  national  misfortune  and 
wrong,  and  shall  always  be  ready  to  rejoice  in  the  pro- 
gress of  true  usefulness  and  the  larger  happiness  of  the 
nation  in  which  she  belongs. 

I  congratulate  King's  Chapel  that  its  history  has  been  a 
patriotic  history  from  the  Ijeginning  to  the  end.  There 
was  no  lack  of  patriotism  so  long  as  she  sprang  from  and 
associated  herself  with  the  life  of  the  colonies  in  the  days 
of  the  Revolution.  From  that  time  she  has  had  her  typical 
men  among  the  noblest,  purest,  holiest  in  our  American 
pulpit.  She  has  been  ever  ready  to  catch  the  spirit  of 
every  new  cause — not  rash  of  imj)ulse,  not  throwing  her- 
self into  the  stream  of  every  enthusiasm  of  the  hour,  but 
always  ready  to  sympathize  deeply  with  every  Avrong  of 


166  ESSAYS  AND  ADVEESSES. 

tlie  land,  and  to  help  every  right  which  was  striving  for 
assertion.  And  when  the  great  crisis  of  om'  history  came, 
she  sent  her  yonng  men — none  nobler,  none  more  nnmer- 
ons,  from  any  city  or  conntry  congregation — she  sent  her 
3'oung  men  into  the  field ;  and  there  they  bore  testimony 
to  the  life  which  they  had  learned  to  live  here  at  home. 

It  is  a  great  thing  for  a  church  thus  to  have  been  asso- 
ciated with  a  nation's  life — always  ready  to  meet  each  new 
emergency  which  called  it  to  its  work,  always  ready  to 
be  even  a  little  beforehand  by  a  general  recognition  of 
that  which  was  coming,  and  by  preparing  her  children  by 
the  fundamental  teaching  of  righteousness  and  truth  that 
they  should  be  ready  when  the  time  arrived. 

One  looks  back  over  this  history  of  two  hundred  years ; 
and  it  is  full  of  such  associations  as  this — the  imagination 
has  so  much  room  to  wander  in  !  One  of  the  things  to 
rejoice  in  on  a  great  occasion  like  this  is  that  this  Chapel 
has  stood  for  two  centuries,  imbibing  such  a  multitude  of 
personal  experiences,  representing  such  countless  souls 
that  have  passed  out  of  the  world  of  living  men  and 
women  and  are  now  with  God ;  that  she  has  striven  with 
issues,  some  of  which  have  been  settled,  and  others  which 
have  developed  into  larger  issues,  Avhicli  have  claimed  in 
their  turn  the  souls  of  men ;  that  she  has  stood,  genera- 
tion after  generation,  for  the  simplicity,  the  dignity,  the 
majesty,  and  the  worth  of  the  Christian  religion  and  the 
Christian  ministry;  that  she  has  had  such  men  in  her 
pulpit,  men  full  of  the  spirit  of  Christian  faith,  righteous- 
ness, and  love ;  men  who,  to  the  congregation  which  lis- 
tened to  them,  have  represented  something  more  than  the 
truth  the}'  preached — the  dignity  of  Christian  manhood 
and  the  sweetness  of  human  character.  It  is  a  great  thing 
that  a  pulpit  should  represent,  not  simply  a  gospel,  but  a 
man ;  not  merely  a  truth,  but  a  character ;  not  merely 
doctrines  which  people  are  to  believe,  but  also  a  ministry 


THE  FOUSlJATIOy  OF  KING'S   CHAPEL.  1G7 

wliicli  should  gain  the  respect  of  young  men  generation 
after  generation ;  that  it  shoukl  teach  men  to  believe  the 
truth  that  the  Christian  ministry  is  indeed  the  noblest 
occupation,  the  grandest  profession,  in  which  men  can 
engage.  When  the  time  shall  come,  as  it  certainly  will 
come,  that  young  men  shall  know  that  truth ;  when  there 
shall  run  through  our  schools  and  colleges  a  new  percep- 
tion, that,  great  as  are  the  glories  which  belong  to  other 
occupations — and  I  would  not  undervalue  them — there  is 
none  that  can  compare  with  those  attaching  to  the  preach- 
ing of  the  gospel  to  the  children  of  God — then  the  voices 
that  have  thrilled  from  the  pulpit  of  the  King's  Chapel 
shall  have  a  testimony  to  bear  which  shall  deepen  the  im- 
pression of  that  truth  as  it  comes  home  to  the  minds  of 
young  men.  It  shall  l^ear  testimony  to  the  way  in  which 
that  truth  has  been  gloriously  manifested  in  the  lives  and 
characters  and  speaking  experiences  of  those  men  who 
have  stood  here ;  who  from  the  very  fact  of  being  here 
have  preached  the  nobleness  of  life,  the  richness  of  the 
pursuit  of  truth,  the  worthlessness  of  everything  that 
does  not  somehow  fasten  itself  to  the  law  of  Clod,  the 
brotherhood  of  mankind,  and  the  assurance  of  a  universal 
Fatherhood. 

One  of  the  beauties  of  such  a  day  as  this  is  that  it  takes 
up  a  long  history,  and  gathers  it  together  within  the  em- 
brace of  gi-eat  principles.  History  develops  itself  here 
and  thei'c  in  a  vast  multitude  of  incidents  and  in  scattered 
ways.  These  commemorative  days  take  the  multitude  of 
the  events  of  history  and  gather  them  up  together,  and 
infold  them  in  the  great  principles  which  have  been  ruling 
through  them  all,  and  in  which  they  must  all  find  their 
explanation. 

It  has  been  intimated  here  this  afternoon  that  the  his- 
tory of  King's  Chapel  has  been  a  varied  one ;  that  men 
have  differed  in  opinion ;  that  there  have  been  discussion 


168  ESS  ATS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

and  dispute.  It  would  not  be  a  true  picture  of  the  thiidc- 
ing  Christian  worhl  if  it  had  been  otherwise.  It  wouki 
not  have  been  a  true  life  of  the  Church  if  it  had  not  rep- 
resented men  differing  from  other  men  with  reference 
to  the  things  which  l)elong,  not  to  the  surface,  but  to  the 
very  depth  and  substance  of  our  faith.  Let  us  set  our- 
selves, friends — we  who  belong  to  the  common  Church  of 
Christ — let  us  set  ourselves  against  the  false  teaching  of 
the  times  that  would  disparage  theology.  Let  us  set  our- 
selves against  the  false  sentiment  that  woidd  sj^eak  of 
theological  discussion  as  if  it  were  a  thing  of  the  past,  a 
blunder  in  its  day,  and  something  which  the  world  has 
outgrown.  When  the  world  ceases  to  theologize — to  seek 
for  the  deepest  and  inmost  truth  with  regard  to  the  in- 
nermost nature  of  God — there  has  fallen  a  palsy  ujion  it. 
Let  us  rejoice  that  the  history  of  this  church  represents 
the  thought  of  earnest  men  who  have  again  and  again 
differed  from  one  another  because  they  have  thought  and 
felt  deeply  about  divine  things.  God  has  never  left  the 
minds  of  His  children  unstirred.  But  while  they  have 
differed  from  one  another,  let  us  rejoice  in  this — that  we 
are  looking  back  upon  the  history  of  men  who  were  ear- 
nestly seeking  after  truth.  And  as  that  history  gathers 
itself  into  our  Christian  consciousness  to-day,  let  us  rejoice 
that  it  lets  us  believe  that  God  has  vaster  purposes  in  the 
history  of  this  and  of  all  His  churches  than  those  who 
have  worked  faithfully  on  tliese  problems  are  able  to 
understand.  Who  believes  to-day  that  the  things  which 
took  place  in  the  beginning  of  this  century  have  come  to 
a  final  result  ?  Who  believes  that  the  changes  which  took 
place  in  connection  with  this  church  and  its  re-formation 
at  the  close  of  the  Revolutionary  War  have  come  to  their 
final  culmination  ?  Who  does  not  feel,  as  he  stands  at  the 
close  of  these  two  hundred  years  and  looks  back  upon  the 
past,  the  necessity  of  believing  that  God  out  of  these  many 


THE  FOUXDATIOX  OF  KING'S   CHAPEL.  169 

3'ears  will  bring  ricli  results  in  the  future ;  that  the  prob- 
lems which  have  been  reasoned  have  not  yet  been  solved  ? 
Who  is  not  ready  to  rejoice  in  every  disturbance  of  the 
past,  so  far  as  it  has  been  the  work  of  good  and  earnest 
men  striving  to  get  at  the  truth  of  God  and  Jesus  Christ  f 
.  How  shall  we  prej)are  ourselves  for  tliat  future  ?  Not 
by  reviving  old  disputes,  but  by  recognizing  the  earnest- 
ness which  entered  into  those  disputes — by  consecrating 
ourselves  in  personal  obedience  to  that  Christ  whose 
nature,  earnestly  studied,  has  led  men  apart  from  one 
another,  as  the}^  have  tried  to  understand  that  which  is 
beyond  the  understanding  of  men  only  because  it  is  in- 
finite and  cannot  be  reached  by  their  intelligence,  not 
because  it  is  denied  to  their  study  by  any  wall  of  prohibi- 
tion. It  seems  to  me  that  -auj  one  wdio  looks  back  on 
the  past  and  recognizes  in  history  the  great  providence 
of  God  in  His  dealings  with  men — so  much  deeper  than 
men  have  begun  to  comprehend — simply  wants  to  say  to 
any  church,  speaking  for  his  own  as  he  speaks  for  others  : 
Let  us  go  and  seek  that  Christ,  that  infinite  Christ,  whom 
we  have  not  begun  to  know  as  we  may  know  Him — that 
Christ  who  has  so  much  more  to  show  us  than  He  has 
shown ;  that  Christ  who  can  show  Himself  to  us  only  as 
we  give  ourselves  in  absolute  obedience  to  Him.  May 
that  Christ  receive  from  us,  in  each  new  period  of  our 
history,  more  complete  consecration,  more  entire  accep- 
tance of  Him  as  our  Master ;  and  so  may  we  receive  from 
Him  rich  promises  of  new  light,  new  manifestations  of 
His  truth,  new  gifts  of  His  Spirit,  which  He  has  promised 
to  bestow  upon  those  who  consecrate  themselves  to  Him 
in  loving  obedience,  unto  the  end  of  time  and  through  all 
eternity !  If  one  may  turn  a  greeting  to  a  pra3^er,  may  I 
not  ask  for  yovi,  as  I  know  you  ask  for  all  of  our  ch arches, 
a  more  profound  and  absolute  spirit  of  consecration  to 
our  Master,  Christ,  that  in  Him,  and  only  in  Him,  we  may 
seek  after  and  come  to  His  ever  richer  life  ? 


ADDRESS  AT  THE  THIRTY-EIGHTH  ANNIVER- 
SARY  OF  THE  YOUNG  MEN'S  CHRISTIAN  AS- 
SOCIATION, BOSTON,  MASS.,  JANUARY  21,  1889. 

I  couxT  it  a  great  privilege  to  be  allowed  to  join  with 
General  WaUver  in  speaking  of  the  institutions  that  in 
this  neighborhood  have  become  established,  and  I  rejoice 
to  have  the  institution  with  which  I  am  connected  among 
them.  It  is  some  years  since  the  Institute  of  Technology 
gave  to  us  its  welcome.  As  Trinity  Church  established 
itself  here,  as  the  Institute  of  Technology  came,  and  as 
one  by  one  the  growing  group  increased,  we  have  rejoiced 
that  the  recognition  of  what  man  had  to  do  for  himself 
and  for  his  fellows  found  its  expression  here.  And  this 
gives  a  certain  exhilarating  and  inspiring  picture  of  the 
largeness  of  man's  conception  of  the  work  that  he  has  to 
do  both  for  himself  and  for  his  brother-men. 

Every  institution  finds  some  pai'ticular  day  on  which 
it  particularly  exercises  itself  and  expresses  its  influence. 
I  suppose  that  on  this  day  this  association,  finding  itself 
subdivided  through  all  the  things  that  it  has  to  do  during 
the  year,  gathers  itself  up  and  thinks  what  it  is.  It  is  for 
its  history,  as  well  as  for  its  present  condition,  that  it  has 
to  be  thankful.  Anybody  who  has  known  the  history  of 
the  Young  Men's  Christian  Association  looks  back  upon 
the  good  men  who  have  given  so  much  care  and  thought 
to  it ;  looks  back  upon  the  number  of  homes  that  it  has 
built,  till  at  last  it  has  clothed  itself  with  the  full  richness 
of  this  beautiful  building  in  which  we  are  to-night ;  looks 
■  '   ■     .  170  •  ■  ;,    c  :■•     .  ■       . 


THIETY-EIGHTE  AXXIVEBSARY  OF  Y.  M.  C.  A.      171 

back  upon  and  remembers  its  conveniences,  its  metliods, 
its  experiments,  upon  the  ways  in  which  it  has  striven  to 
make  its  life  effective  in  the  life  of  the  city ;  and  remem- 
bers the  almost  countless  numbers  of  young  men  who, 
scattered  now  in  all  parts  of  the  land,  look  back  to  the 
Young  Men's  Christian  Association  of  Boston  as  the  source 
of  much  of  their  first  inspiration. 

Let  us  think  for  a  few  moments  about  this  institution, 
and  what  it  means  as  the  representative  of  the  condition 
(as  we  may  say)  to  wliich  the  city,  and  the  age,  and  the 
world  has  reached  just  in  the  position  in  which  we  are 
now  standing.  An  institution  comes  in  its  true  time,  and 
cannot  come  before  its  time ;  and  it  passes  away  after  a 
time,  and  it  is  good  that  it  should  pass  away.  We  can- 
not think  about  the  institutions  that  have  been  in  history 
and  ceased  to  be,  as  if  they  were  all  blunders  and  mis- 
takes. Institutions  ai'e  to  the  rehgious  life  of  man  what 
the  leaves  are  to  the  trees.  You  cannot  bring  them  out 
till  the  springtime  conies  ;  you  cannot  take  them  away  till 
the  winter  approaches.  So  you  cannot  bring  an  institu- 
tion out  of  the  life  of  man  till  the  life  of  man  has  reached 
that  place  where  it  calls  foj-th  that  institution ;  and  so  you 
cannot  keep  that  institution  on  the  life  of  man,  really, 
after  its  work  has  been  completely  done.  Therefore  the 
interesting  thing  is  to  see  how  there  is,  beneath  and  be- 
yond all  the  institutions  of  mankind,  the  great  religious 
life  of  humanity  within  these  things  that  are  perpetually 
changing,  like  the  green  and  unfolding  leaf  of  the  tree. 
There  comes  out  in  the  different  institutions,  which  are  as 
the  masses  of  leaves  which  express  the  ever-growing  life 
of  the  tree  of  humanit}-,  this  same  identical  life  with  which 
it  has  been  full  from  the  beginning. 

There  are  certain  great  things  which  all  institutions 
have  expressed  from  the  very  beginning,  and  must  ex- 
press to  the  end,  which,  although  they  put  on  different 


172  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

forms,  are  the  same.  What  are  they?  Man  and  his  na- 
ture, and  those  things  which  make  him  the  being  that  he 
is.  Man  has  not  changed  from  the  beginning.  Man  has 
been  always  the  same.  And  in  man  there  has  always 
been  the  consciousness  of  a  higher  power :  man  has  felt 
it  more  or  less  dimly  and  more  or  less  clearly.  Now  he 
has  rejoiced  in  it,  and  now  he  has  been  sorry  for  it,  but 
man  has  been  always  conscious  that  there  was  something 
greater  than  himself.  And  in  all  the  range  of  religious 
Christian  history,  besides  the  essential  life  of  God  and  the 
continual  life  of  man,  there  has  alwaj^s  been  the  life  of 
the  Christliead ;  that  is,  the  recognition  of  how  God  and 
man  are  bound  together.  These  are  the  things  that  never 
change,  that  never  cease  to  be,  that  never  began  to  be, 
except  at  the  beginning  of  our  human  life :  the  life  of 
Christ,  which  represents,  which  declares,  the  perpetual 
union  between  God  and  man,  the  way  in  which  God  is 
forever  uttering  Himself  in  love,  and  man  may  forever 
utter  himself  in  obedience.  Every  institution  may  rep- 
resent this.  The  institution  which  stands  with  its  great 
tower  just  opposite  this  institution,  our  institution  farther 
down  the  street,  where  we  try  to  bring  our  people  close 
together  for  the  worship  of  God,  and  this  institution,  with 
all  its  relations  of  pai't  to  part — all  these  and  all  other 
institutions  are  l3ut  the  particular  forms  in  which  these 
ideas  come  forth  in  different  ages  and  in  different  men. 
No  other  institution  has  any  genuine  hfe  that  is  not  a 
representation  of  the  life  of  man,  or  God,  or  the  Clirist- 
head.  So  every  rehgious  institution,  and  every  institu- 
tion whieli  in  its  highest  view  is  capable  of  being  called 
a  religious  institution,  is  the  true  manifestation  of  this 
perpetual  life,  of  man's  life,  and  the  God-life,  and  the 
Christ-life,  that  is  filling  the  whole  world  fi'om  the  Ijcgin- 
ning  to  the  end. 

And  then  we  look  at  each  age  and  time,  and  see  Avhat 


THIUTT-EIGHTH  AXXIVEESAET  OF  Y.  M.  C.  A.      173 

institution,  what  phase  of  life,  each  has  called  forth.  In 
what  form  may  we  look  for  the  life  which  the  present 
time  should  produce  ? 

Now,  an  institution  such  as  this  must  answer  the  con- 
ditions of  the  time,  or  it  has  no  business  to  be.  It  never 
would  have  come  into  the  vigorous  life  which  it  has  to- 
day, it  would  have  failed  of  the  object  in  which  it  has 
been  growing  during  the  year,  if  it  was  not  suited  to  the 
times. 

May  we  consider  the  meaning  of  the  times,  and  see 
what  sort  of  religious  institution  this  ought  to  produce  ? 
There  are  certain  conditions  that  might  declare  what  sort 
of  an  institution  will  be  the  religious  institution  of  the 
latter  part  of  tliis  nineteenth  century. 

And  there  are  three  great  characteristics  of  religion  to- 
day that  everybody  recognizes :  First,  the  humanizing  of 
it,  as  it  may  be  called — that  is,  the  way  in  which  it  has  in 
these  latter  days  burst  the  shell  in  which  it  lived  for  many 
years,  and  became,  what  it  has  not  been  in  other  days,  the 
property  of  all  men.  When  the  priesthood  lost  its  power, 
when  the  Christian  Church  became  no  longer  simply  a 
body  of  men  with  j)eculiar  forms,  doing  certain  things 
which  no  other  men  were  supposed  to  do ;  when  it  ceased 
to  be  the  clergyman's  Church,  and  recognized  itself,  as  it 
is  recognizing  itself  to-day,  as  simply  the  great  aggregate 
of  all  men  who  love  their  Clod  and  love  their  fellow-men 
— a  great  change  took  place,  which  showed  that  a  new 
time  had  come,  and  that  the  institution  which  represented 
that  time  should  be  different  from  the  institutions  of 
medieval  times.  The  modern  Cluirch  is  different  from 
the  medieval  Church,  in  that  it  no  longer  takes  its  vota- 
ries from  certain  men,  but  says  that  in  every  man  who 
loves  God  and  his  fellow-men  is  found  as  true  a  minister 
of  Christ  as  any  ordained  preacher.  What  a  great  change 
is  that ! 


174  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Another  change  has  come  into  the  Christian  Chnrch  in 
modern  times.  It  is  the  distinct  recognition  of  things  as 
sacred  which  have  not  been  regarded  as  sacred :  not  cer- 
tain acts  which  are  technically  religions  acts,  bnt  every- 
thing that  relates  to  man ;  man  in  his  completeness,  the 
whole  man,  has  got  to  he  religious,  has  got  to  be  touched 
by  religion.  This,  and  more  than  this,  the  conception  of 
religion  has  to  add  to  it.  Man  must  be  religious ;  that  is, 
must  be  bound  to  the  highest  forces  under  which  he  can 
possibly  live  the  whole  man  into  subjection. 

The  third  of  the  great  changes  that  religion  has  under- 
gone is,  that  it  now  constitutes  itself,  not  simply  a  func- 
tion of  man's  life,  able  to  believe  and  worship,  but  also  as 
the  aggregate  result  of  all  these  things.  It  is  bound  to 
work  and  influence  the  world  in  which  it  lives,  each  relig- 
ious generation  leaving  the  world,  not  full  of  the  myste- 
rious incense  of  prayers  that  it  has  prtiyed,  but  leaving 
the  world  better  in  every  part  of  its  life,  made  to  be  better, 
and  to  live  more  for  the  religious  life  that  has  been  in  it 
in  any  generation  when  that  generation  passes  awa\'. 

These  are  three  things  which  constitute  the  character- 
istics of  the  religion  of  our  time.  Its  greater  humanness 
extends  what  it  believes  to  every  man ;  its  larger  concep- 
tion of  sanctity  finds  its  operation  in  fields  that  used  to 
be  counted  secular ;  and  its  conception  of  work,  of  labor 
to  be  carried  on  and  effect  to  be  produced,  find  expression 
in  its  practical  activities. 

To  go  back :  Every  institution  that  springs  out  of  this 
time  must  embody  these  things,  or  it  is  not  a  ti'ue  insti- 
tution. Every  institution  that  calls  itself  religious  now 
must  find  in  itself  the  j^ower  of  the  religion  of  this  day. 
What  shall  this  be?  A  true  recognition  of  religious 
things,  which  belongs  not  simply  to  any  priesthood  but 
to  all  religious  men — the  right  to  count  everj^thing  sacred 
by  which  man  can  be  made  a  more  complete  being,  and 


THIRTY-EIGHTH  AXXIVEESARY  OF  Y.  M.  C.  A.      175 

the  recognition  of  man's  work  as  the  final  function  of  re- 
ligious life. 

What  shall  we  say  of  the  Young  Men's  Christian  Asso- 
ciation if,  in  the  influence  that  goes  forth  from  these  walls, 
every  young  man  is  taught  that  he  is  a  priest  of  God ;  that 
other  men  are  to  be  reached  by  him ;  that  God  is  to  shine 
through  him,  no  matter  what  may  be  the  special  form  of 
the  activity  that  makes  his  life  transparent ;  if  within 
these  walls,  with  not  simply  a  chapel,  but  with  a  library, 
with  the  museums  in  which  the  pictures  of  the  good  works 
of  saints  shall  be  an  inspiration,  in  the  gymnasium,  where 
men's  bodies  are  trained— through  all  there  runs  one  spir- 
it, so  that  it  is  a  Young  Men's  Christian  Association  from 
the  turret  to  the  foundation-stone,  so  that  no  part  of  it  is 
secular,  so  that  its  gj'mnasium  and  its  library  are  sacred, 
from  its  prayer-meeting-room  to  its  amusement-room ;  if, 
again,  there  is  entii-e  recognition  of  its  spirit,  every  part 
for  devotion,  if  the  great  final  purpose  of  it  all  is  work, 
influence,  and  effect  and  operation  to  be  produced — then 
this  is  a  true  Christian  institution,  this  is  a  development 
of  a  Christian  age.  It  declares  the  ripened  religion  of  the 
woi-ld  in  the  form  in  which  it  has  taken  its  manifestation, 
from  the  simple  influence  of  a  few  years  ago  to  the  beau- 
tiful building  of  to-day,  through  all  the  religious  ideas  of 
its  builders  and  founders. 

I  have  no  fear  of  that  which  some  good  men  have  feared, 
when  they  have  asked  about  the  Young  Mens  Chris- 
tian Association,  of  its  interference  with  the  Churches  of 
Christ.  It  is  the  Church  of  Christ.  There  is  no  question 
of  the  hand  interfering  with  the  heart.  Each  is  a  minis- 
ter to  the  other.  It  is  not  simply  that  they  have  one 
spirit  and  divided  functions,  so  that  we  shall  say  that 
the  churches  are  the  heart  and  that  this  institution  is  the 
hand ;  but  Church  and  institution  both  have  heart-power 
and  hand-power  in  them,  each  of  them,  and  thev  are  as 


17G  ESSAYS  AXD  A V DRESSES. 

close  as  one  part  of  the  life  can  be  to  the  other  part  of 
the  life. 

If  I  were  to  group  together  all  the  tilings  that  I  have 
tried  to  picture  to  you,  and  remember  that  religion  is 
nothing  in  the  world  but  the  highest  conception  of  life — 
the  word  that  is  to  express  this  all,  the  word  that  is  to 
carry  forward  men  as  they  come  to  believe  in  it,  what 
shall  it  be  ?  In  every  department  of  life,  whether  I  look 
at  politics,  at  government,  at  social  life,  and  the  relation 
of  ethics  thereto,  whether  I  look  at  religion,  there  is  only 
one  word  that  expresses  the  cord  that  binds  the  human 
race :  that  word  is  sympathy.  Present  and  past  religion 
seems  to  have  been  developing  conditions  under  which 
sjanpathy  might  work.  The  characteristic  word  of  the 
past  hundred  years  has  been  Liberty.  Liberty  is  a  nega- 
tive term — the  i-emoval  of  obstacles,  the  setting  free  of 
conditions  under  Avhicli  the  essential  and  absolute  and 
positive  power  of  sympathy,  of  the  relation  of  man  to 
man  under  the  recognition  of  their  brotherhood,  should 
find  its  place  and  expression. 

This  is  a  great  year.  Suppose  you  look  back  and  think 
what  the  year  1789  was.  Suppose  you  draw  back  the 
curtain,  and  what  wotild  j'ou  hear  and  see  ?  You  would 
see  the  last  downfall  of  t}Tanny,  and  the  first  manifesta- 
tion on  this  new  continent  of  the  power  of  rejjresentative 
government,  which  is  the  power  of  organized  sympathy 
and  human  brotherhood.  You  would  see  the  National 
Assemljly  gathered  in  France,  and,  before  the  year  was 
over,  the  Bastile  in  ruins.  And  you  would  see  George 
Washington  being  inaugurated  the  first  President  of  the 
United  States.  In  the  sight  of  these  two  events  in  the 
year  1789,  you  have  most  correctly  the  meeting  of  the  old 
and  the  new :  that  which  was  ready  to  perish,  all  that 
feudal  life  which  we  dare  not  believe  had  not  its  purposes 
in  the  providence  of  God,  but  which  had  done  its  work 


THIRTY-EIGHTH  ANNIVFAISABY  OF  Y.  M.  C.  A,      111 

and  was  to  pass  away ;  and,  coining  reverently  into  the 
presence  of  that  angnst  American,  you  would  have  that 
symbol  of  the  future — who  took  the  rulership  of  the  na- 
tion with  every  assertion  that  he  took  it  as  no  personal 
privilege,  but  as  the  representative  of  the  men  who  had 
called  him  to  be  President. 

Let  us  believe  that  this  institution,  and  all  which  are 
flourishing  to-day,  are  those  which  are  expressing,  and 
must  more  and  more  express,  the  sympathy  which  is  cur- 
ing more  and  more  the  evils  of  social  life ;  which  is  mak- 
ing harmonious  the  differences  of  our  commercial  life, 
and  entering  more  and  more  into  the  obstructed  ways 
of  secular  life,  which  is  coming  to  elevate  manhood  in  its 
relations. 

Am  I  talking  too  largety,  examining  too  great  ques- 
tions, when  this  is  only  an  anniversary  meeting  of  the 
Young  Men's  Christian  Association  ?  No  man  ever,  and 
no  institution  ever,  did  anything  great,  anything  worth 
doing,  anything  that  was  a  feeble  apology  for  existence, 
unless  it  felt  moving  at  its  heart  the  spii'it  of  the  world, 
the  spirit  of  its  time,  the  Spirit  of  the  Christ,  who  in  every 
developing  power  is  the  Holy  Spirit  itself,  nnd  brings  to 
completer  and  completer  fulfilment  that  human  life  which 
He  saved  and  which  He  forever  renews. 

Therefore  cultivate  the  power  of  s^nnpathy,  because  it 
is  the  spirit  of  your  age  and  of  the  coming  age.  Think 
of  none  of  its  developments  as  impossible ;  do  not  forsake 
them  to  gaze  simply  upon  the  i)ast  or  the  present,  but  in 
your  own  j^ersonal  life,  and  in  the  institution  which  you 
love,  and  which  has  done  such  good  work  in  our  city,  and 
every  city,  extend  out  from  the  center :  that  does  the  good 
work,  for  the  city  must  do  it  for  the  world.  May  you  ever 
rise  and  expand  in  youi-  work  of  sympathy,  making  ever}' 
anniversary  more  glorious  than  the  last. 


ADDRESS   AT   THE   INSTALLATION   OF   REV. 

LYMAN  ABBOTT,  D.D.,  OVER   PLYMOUTH 

CHURCH,  BROOKLYN,  N.  Y.,  JAN.  16, 1890. 

From  the  moment  when  we  met  this  morning,  my 
friends,  every  one  of  us  has  realized  how  impossible  it 
was  for  us  to  look  forward  wdthout  looking  back.  It  is 
so  in  every  great  and  critical  moment,  in  ever}^  moment 
which  brings  to  a  focus  that  which  has  been,  and  then 
opens  up  the  prospect  and  the  promise  of  that  which  is 
to  be.  But  it  has  been  especially  so  here ;  and  as  I  stand 
for  a  very  few  moments  where  I  count  it  a  very  great 
privilege  to  stand,  in  the  place  in  which  he  has  so  often 
stood  whom  we  counted  the  foremost  preacher  of  Amer- 
ica and  of  our  land  and  of  our  times,  I  cannot  help  feel- 
ing with  what  beautiful  fitness  our  minds  have  ever  been 
turning  from  the  bi-ight  prospect  which  is  opening  before 
this  church  to  the  bright  promise  in  history  which  lies 
behind  it.  You  have  had  in  Plymouth  Church  the  great- 
est preacher  of  America  and  of  our  century,  and,  whatever 
has  been  said  with  regard  to  the  abundance  of  his  power 
and  the  vast  diversity  of  his  gifts,  it  seems  to  me  that  the 
feeling  which  we  have  to-night — that  we  have  had  all  to- 
day as  we  have  thought  of  him — has  been  the  simplicity 
and  the  power  that  belonged  to  him,  and  it  is  in  tlie  sim- 
plicity of  the  past  and  in  the  simplicity  of  the  future  that 
the  great  power  of  Plymouth  Church  abides.  Mr.  Beecher 
was  many  things,  but  he  was  in  everything  the  Christian 
preacher ;  and  the  one  greatest  of  all  things,  it  seems  to 

178 


THE  INSTALLATION  OF  BET.  LYMAN  ABBOTT.    179 

me,  wliicli  this  land,  .has  to  thank  him  for  is  that  he  has 
borne  testimom^ — a  testimony  which  shall  be  heard  for- 
ever— to  the  greatness  and  dignity  of  the  Christian  preach- 
ership.  I  do  not  mean  simpl}^  by  the  uttering  of  sermons, 
though  they  were  fine,  and  no  sermons  have  been  heard 
that  were  like  his ;  but  he  has  declared  that  everything 
the  Cliristian  minister  does  in  every  department  of  his 
work,  whether  it  be  in  the  administration  of  charity,  in 
the  management  of  parochial  machinery,  in  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  Christian  sacrament,  in  everything  he  is  the 
Christian  preacher  manifesting  the  power  of  the  Christian 
j)reachersliip  and  the  administration  of  the  Christian  gos- 
pel. In  everything  he  is  maldng  felt  upon  mankind  the 
power  of  the  eternal  Christian  truths  of  the  fatherhood  of 
God  aud  the  sonshij)  of  mankind,  of  the  love  of  heaven 
and  of  the  possibility  of  earth,  and  that  which  we  look 
forward  to  is  the  regeneration  of  the  Christian  ministry 
in  its  great  preaching-power.  Whatever  yoiu*  new  pas- 
tors shall  find  to  do,  they  shall  be  j)reachers  forever  and 
continually;  and,  therefore,  any  one  who  in  any  degree 
and  in  any  place  is  struggling  with  the  work  of  Christian 
preachership  rejoices  in  the  past  and  for  the  future,  and 
is  thankful  for  what  to-da}^  we  have  been  prepared  to  look 
forward  to  and  believe  is  to  be. 

The  one  thought  that  is  upon  my  mind  to-night  is 
the  power  of  that  Christian  preachership,  which,  with  the 
abundance  of  the  ways  of  its  exercise,  always  concentrates 
itself  in  this  great  power  of  the  human  voice  by  which  the 
man  always  attaches  his  soul's  belief  to  other  souls,  which, 
making  it  their  belief,  shall  find  in  it  the  power  of  their 
life;  but  having  its  essence  in  tliis,  that  the  Christian 
preacher  must  have  his  nature  open  upon  both  sides — 
upon  the  one  side  to  God,  and  upon  the  other  side  to 
man.  All  missing  things  are  to  be  supplied  by  truth  and 
the  God  who  comes  through  truth  to  men.     All  commu- 


180  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

nication  between  God  on  one  side  and  human  nature  and 
its  needs  on  tlie  other  side  is  of  the  essence  of  the  Chris- 
tian preachership.  And  so  it  is  in  the  great  preachership 
of  the  past  and  in  the  rich  preachersliips  of  the  future 
that  we  rejoice  that  we  are  able  to  stand  here  and  con- 
gratulate Plymouth  Church  to-day. 

It  seems  to  me  the  one  thing  we  want  to  assure  our- 
selves of,  my  friends,  is  tliis,  that  there  is  no  problem  be- 
fore the  Christian  Church  and  the  world,  however  puz- 
zling it  may  be,  however  it  may  seem  to  be  puzzling  to  the 
most  ingenious  of  our  thoughts,  that  does  not  really,  must 
not  really,  find  its  solution  ultimately  in  the  increased 
energy  and  power,  the  increased  energy  and  strength,  of 
the  Chi'istian  ministr}^,  and  most  largely  the  Christian 
preach(irship. 

What  are  the  problems  that  are  before  the  Church  to- 
day? I  would  not  think  for  one  moment  that  there  is 
anything  strange  in  the  fact  that  I  should  have  the  privi- 
lege of  standing  before  you  to-night,  that  there  should  be 
anything  strange  that  a  man  calling  himself  by  one  Chris- 
tian name  should  say  Godspeed  to  a  brother  of  another 
name  as  he  starts  forth  on  the  great  road  of  a  ministry 
like  this.  But  we  do  know  how  men  whose  "hearts  are 
one  are  separated  in  their  divided  lives ;  we  do  know  how 
denomination  draws  itself  apart  from  denomination,  each 
bearing  its  different  name  and  waving  it  upon  its  banner 
as  if  it  were  the  sign  of  a  separation,  and  not  of  a  common 
loyalty  to  a  great  Master  and  a  common  cause.  Is  there 
anything  that  is  going  to  bring  our  broken  Church  to- 
gether and  make  it  one  great  body  of  Jesus  Christ  ?  With 
all  my  heart  I  believe  it  is  nothing  but  a  deeper  fidelity 
within  the  Church,  a  more  complete  energizing  of  every 
one  of  these  particles  of  the  Church.  It  is  not  by  arrange- 
ments, it  is  not  by  pronunciamentos,  it  is  not  by  constitu- 
tions, it  is  not  by  conventions ;  but  when  every  part  of 


THE   IXSTJLLATIOX  OF  EEV.  LYMAN  ABBOTT.     181 

the  Church  shall  be  fired  by  the  furnace  of  its  spirit  with 
consecration  to  the  Master,  with  love  of  His  truth  and 
with  entire  love  of  the  souls  of  men,  there  shall  be  noth- 
ing left  of  the  disunion,  the  disruption,  of  Christendom ; 
but  the  great  Christian  comniuuion  shall  build  itself  with 
the  perfect  fidelity  of  the  entire  inspired  Church. 

And  what  is  another  question  that  is  before  us  perj^et- 
ually  f  It  is  the  question  of  the  separation  of  dogma  and 
life.  Men  are  driven  foolishly  to  say  on  one  side  that 
dogma  is  everj'^thing,  and  on  the  other,  that  life  is  every- 
thing. As  if  there  could  be  any  life  that  did  not  spring 
out  of  truth !  As  if  there  could  be  any  truth  that  was 
really  felt  that  did  not  manifest  itself  in  life  !  It  is  not 
by  doctrine  becoming  less  earnest  in  filling  itself  with  all 
the  purity  of  God.  It  is  only  b}^  both  dogma  and  life, 
doctrine  and  life,  liecoming  vitalized  through  and  through, 
that  they  shall  reach  after  and  find  another.  Only  when 
things  are  alive  do  they  reach  out  for  the  fulness  of  their 
life  and  claim  that  which  belongs  to  them. 

What  is  another  problem  that  is  before  us  ?  The  rela- 
tion of  the  Christian  Church  to  this  great  human  world. 
It  is  not  separate  from  it.  It  has  no  business  here  excej^t 
when  it  represents  the  ideal  of  that  life  which  is  in  reality 
all  around  us.  The  Christian  Church  is  nothing  except  a 
specimen  of  that  which  all  humanit}''  ought  to  be  strug- 
gling to  be.  The  Christian  Church,  if  it  completely  real- 
ized itself  at  this  moment,  would  be  nothing  except  the 
fulfilment  of  that  which  is  the  possibility  of  all  mankind. 
Let  the  Christian  Church,  then,  be  energized;  let  it  l)e 
full  of  its  virtuous  spirit ;  let  it  be  animated  with  all  the 
love  of  truth,  the  love  of  God  and  of  the  world,  and  then 
how  it  shall  reach  out  and  claim  in  unsuspected  places 
those  things  which  belong  to  it !  Wherever  there  is  the 
power  of  God,  wherever  there  is  the  wisdom  of  God — that 
is  to  say,  wherever  there  is  the  essential  Christ,  the  Christ 


182  JiSSATS  JXD   ADDIiESSES. 

tliat  is  manifest  and  historic  in  the  sonl — the  Church  shall 
send  forth  its  claim  and  say,  ''  That  belongs  to  ns." 

One  of  the  strangest  and  richest  phenomena  of  the 
future  is  going  to  be  the  Christian  Church  finding  herself 
where  she  least  expected  to  find  herself ;  but  she  will  find 
it  not  b}^  less  believing,  but  by  more  believing,  in  herself 
and  in  the  power  of  the  Christ  whom  she  serves. 

It  is  because  these  vast  problems  are  pressing  upon  the 
souls  of  men ;  it  is  because  of  the  separation  of  Christian 
from  Christian  under  different  names  ;  it  is  because  of  the 
separation  of  doctrine  from  life,  as  if  those  Avere  antago- 
nists which  are  part  of  one  living  whole,  neither  of  them 
having-  any  real  existence  except  as  it  is  welded  to  the 
other ;  it  is  because  the  Church  stands  off  from  the  world 
when  she  ought  to  be  forever  claiming  the  world  and 
finding  the  power  of  her  own  life  in  that  humanity  of 
Avhich  she  simply  represents  the  divine  ideal,  the  purpose 
and  the  ultimate  perfection ;  it  is  l)ecause  these  are  the 
great  questions  that  are  on  the  soul  of  man  to-day,  the 
questions  which  once  settled  the  world  shall  have  come 
to  tlie  fulness  and  completeness  of  its  life ;  it  is  because  of 
their  earnest  ministry,  the  consecration  of  devoted  men — 
that  Ave  rejoice  to-day  to  see  tAvo  consecrated  men  giving 
themselves  in  this  great  field,  sanctified  by  all  the  past 
and  opening  out  of  all  the  past  such  a  rich  and  glorious 
future; "that  we  rejoice  to  see  them  consecrating  them- 
seh^es  and  receiving  the  cordial  Avelcome  of  the  Churches 
as  they  begin  their  work. 

The  next  tAA^entA^  years  of  the  Christian  ministry  may 
be  something  in  this  AA'^orld  such  as  no  ministry  has  been 
in  any  twenty  years  of  the  past.  For  the  next  twenty 
years,  and  many  more  yeai's  to  come,  if  it  pleases  Him, 
may  God's  blessing  rest  upon  these  brethren  of  ours  AA-ho 
to-day  are  made  the  ministers  of  Plymouth  Cliurcn. 


ORTHODOXY. 

(Clericus  Club,  Cambridge,  Mass.,  June  2,  1890.) 

In  Sir  Plenry  Taylor's  drama,  "  Edwin  the  Fair,"  Frid- 
stan.  Bishop  of  Lichfield,  and  Leofwyn,  Bishop  of  Lin- 
coln, are  discnssing  tlie  arrogant  behavior  of  Dunstan,  the 
Abbot  of  Glastonbnry.  '•  This  is  not  right,"  says  Lich- 
field. "  No,  nor  canonical,"  answers  Lincoln.  It  is  a  truly 
ecclesiastical  response.  It  refers  the  matter  instantly  to 
a  judgment-seat  distinct  from  that  which  the  universal 
conscience  knows.  It  seems  to  count  that  second  judg- 
ment-seat the  most  important.  At  any' rate,  it  considers 
the  ^'erdict  of  the  general  tribunal  to  be  distinctly  strength- 
ened by  the  special  judgment  of  the  Church's  law.  One 
might  have  put  up  with  the  things  being  "  not  right,"  but 
that  it  should  be  also  not  canonical  put  it  entirely  beyond 
the  pale  of  tolerance. 

"Right"  and  "canonical"  are  words  applying  to  be- 
havior. The  corresponding  words  applying  to  belief  are 
"  true "  and  "  orthodox."  When  one  man  says  of  any 
statement,  "  That  is  not  true,"  and  another  voice  rej)lies, 
"  No,  nor  orthodox,"  once  more  we  have  the  two  tribunals, 
one  which  is  recognized  by  all  men,  the  other  which  in- 
volves initiation,  and  which  is  familiar  only  to  a  few.  And 
once  more  we  are  set  to  wondering  which  of  them  is  in 
the  speakers'  mind  the  most  important ;  once  more  at  least 
we  feel  that  in  the  mind  of  the  last  speaker  the  second 
judgment  makes  a  distinct  addition  to  the  first.    It  is  good 

183 


184  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDEESSES. 

tliat  the  statement  should  be  true.  It  is  better  still  that 
it  also  should  be  orthodox. 

Let  us  make  some  attempt  to  see  iu  what  relation  the 
two  words  and  the  ideas  which  they  represent  stand  to 
one  another.  It  is  one  of  the  cases  in  which  etymolog:y 
fails  us.  Merely  looking  at  their  forms,  the  two  words 
are  identical,  except  that  one  is  short  and  simple  Saxon 
and  the  other  is  long  and  lumbering  Greek ;  they  both 
describe  the  same  qualities  of  conformity  to  essential 
verity.  But  they  must  have  some  different  tone  and 
meaning,  or  they  would  not  both  be  used.  If  truth  and 
orthodoxy  were  always  identical  in  shape  and  size  and 
color,  the  presentation  of  both  of  them  before  our  eyes 
would  be  a  useless  repetition.  The  Bishop  of  Lincoln 
must  add  something  when  he  responds,  "  No,  nor  ortho- 
dox," to  the  Bishop  of  Lichfield's  "  This  is  not  true."  And 
no  doubt  in  the  very  forms  of  the  words  there  is  an  indi- 
cation of  the  difference.  Orthodoxy  or  straight  opinion 
has  in  its  very  sound  a  suggestion  of  standards  of  judg- 
ment, of  conformity,  and  therefore  of  possible  nonconform- 
ity to  some  embodiment  or  expression  of  the  essential  ver- 
ity. We  feel  in  it  the  ideas  of  acceptance  and  approval, 
of  that  which  is  relative  to  the  thought  and  convictions 
of  men  as  well  as  of  that  which  is  absolute  with  its  fixed 
nature  in  itself.  This  is  the  distinction  between  ortho- 
doxy and  truth — the  presence  of  this  personal  element. 
Orthodoxy  is  accepied  truth,  and  all  the  questions  of  by 
whom,  and  when,  and  where  the  acceptance  has  been  made 
fly  open  the  moment  that  we  say  the  word. 

The  old  Fathers  who  made  the  word  ''  orthodoxy  "  seem 
to  have  made  another  corresponding  word,  a  delightful 
word,  "kadodoxy,"  which  has  not  maintained  its  place. 
Instead  of  it  the  distincth' personal  word,  '' heresy,"  has 
become  the  familiar  opposite  of  orthodoxy.  There  is  sig- 
nificance in  tliis  if  it  indicates  how  truly  the  personal  ele- 


ORTHODOXY.  185 

ment  is  in  the  whole  conceptiou,  though  it  has  forced  the 
declaration  of  itself  more  on  the  negative  than  on  the 
positive  side. 

We  define  orthodoxy,  then,  to  be  truth  as  accepted  and 
registered  by  authority.  As  soon  as  we  say  this,  and  re- 
member how  much  of  truth  there  is  which  man  does  not 
know,  and  so  cannot  accept  or  register,  we  see  at  once 
that  orthodox}^  must  be  less  than  the  absolute  truth,  and 
begin  to  discover  what  must  be  the  kind  of  relation  which 
exists  between  them.  If  man's  acceptance  and  registra- 
tion of  truth  is  perfectly  correct  so  far  as  it  goes,  and 
simply  incomplete,  then  truth  and  orthodoxy  lie  like  two 
concentric  circles,  the  circle  of  orthodoxy  within  the  circle 
of  truth  and  a  ring  between  them,  into  which,  when  ortho- 
doxy is  falsely  allowed  to  confuse  itself  with  truth,  the 
mind  enters  with  misgiving,  sometimes  almost  by  stealth, 
as  if  it  had  no  business  there.  This  is  the  region  where 
often  the  very  existence  of  the  idea  of  orthodoxy  does 
most  harm. 

If  that  Avhicli  is  accepted  as  true  is  not  merely  imper- 
fect, but  absolutely  incorrect,  then  another  evil  comes. 
The  circles  tlien  are  not  concentric,  and  however  small 
the  circle  of  orthodoxy  may  be,  it  overruns  the  line  of 
truth,  and  the  man  who  is  most  orthodox,  l)y  the  very 
intensity  of  his  orthodoxy  most  earnestly  believes  a  false- 
hood and  breathes  its  essential  poison.  It  is  conceivable, 
somethnes,  no  doubt  it  has  happened,  that  the  center  and 
whole  circumference  of  orthodoxy  lies  outside  of  the  circle 
of  truth.  Then  belief  becomes  death  and  not  life,  and 
reverence  is  the  degradation  and  not  the  exaltation  of  the 
soul. 

This  is  the  difference  of  orthodoxy  from  truth  in  the 
matter  of  size  and  situation.  But  quite  apart  from  this, 
and  even  more  important,  is  its  difference  in  color.  That 
which  is  believed  because  it  is  orthodox  is  beheved  in  a 


186  ES:SA1,S   jyV   ADDRESSES. 

different  way  from  precisely  the  same  thing  beheved  be- 
cause it  is  true.  And  if  it  is  of  consequence  not  merely 
what  we  believe  but  how  we  believe,  then  the  mechanical- 
ness  and  dryness  and  selfishness  and  fear  with  which  we 
believe  the  orthodox  must  ever  stand  in  contrast  to  the 
freshness  and  enthusiasm  and  freedom  and  self-forgetful- 
ness  and  hope  with  which  we  believe  the  true. 

We  understand,  of  coui'se,  that  the  conception  of  ortho- 
doxy comes  in  wherever  men  are  capable  of  seeking  and 
of  holding  truth.  Every  science  has  its  orthodoxy  as 
well  as  theology.  Art  has  its  orthodoxy,  declaring  itself 
in  royal  exhibitions.  Literature  has  its  orthodoxy,  and 
builds  its  French  academies.  The  orthodoxy  of  language 
in  embodied  in  the  Standard  Dictionary.  The  orthodoxy 
of  dress  and  society  is  what  we  know  as  fashion.  The 
Massachusetts  Medical  Society  sets  forth  the  local  ortho- 
doxy of  the  healing  art.  The  party  platform  is  the  ortho- 
doxy of  politics.  In  ever}^  region  truth  attained  and  truth 
attainable  are  the  two  presences,  and  the  less  is  forever 
lifting  up  its  voice  and  claiming  to  be  the  greater. 

According  to  the  fineness  of  the  material  it  deals  Avith 
will  always  be  the  evil  which  any  evil  principle  can  do. 
And  so  the  mischief  of  orthodoxy,  mistaking  itself  for 
truth,  will  be  most  mischievous  of  all  in  Christianity. 
That  the  principle  of  orthodoxy  has  its  rightful  place  and 
use  is  clearly  enough  manifested  in  the  New  Testament. 
When  Paul  bids  Timothy  "  Hold  fast  the  form  of  sound 
words  which  thou  hast  heard  of  me,"  he  is  clearly  enough 
declaring  that  for  immediate  use  the  truth  so  far  as  it  is 
at  present  known  may  and  must  cast  itself  into  a  definite 
and  availai)le  expression,  but  his  prayer  in  the  next  chap- 
ter, "  The  Lord  give  thee  understanding  in  all  things,"  is 
not  therefore  a  meaningless  or  hopeless  prayer.  When 
Jude  exhorts  liis  hearers  that  they  should  "  earnestl_v  con- 
tend for  the  faith  which  Avas  once  delivered  to  the  saints," 


ORTHODOXY.  187 

he  is  bej^oud  all  doubt  asserting  that  there  is  an  accepted 
substance  of  the  religion  which  he  and  they  believe.  But 
no  one  surely  reads  that  overbui'dened  text  aright  who 
does  not  ever  hold  in  his  remembrance  that  the  faith 
of  which  Jude  speaks  is  more  moral  than  doctrinal,  more 
personal  than  abstract,  and  that  being  the  word  of  life  it 
can  be  effectively  contended  for  only  as  it  is  constantly 
expected  to  open  new  richness  in  the  advancing  relations 
to  the  life  of  men.  In  that  great  text  truth  and  orthodoxy 
meet  and  blend,  not  by  the  limiting  of  truth  to  that  wliich 
the  disciple  has  ah'cady  consciously'  appropriated,  but 
by  the  enlargement  of  orthodoxy  till  it  potentially  pos- 
sesses all  that  is  included  in  and  to  be  unfolded  from  the 
Word  of  God,  the  Christ  who  is  the  inexhaustible  posses- 
sion of  the  Christian  and  the  Chui'ch.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  evil  disposition  of  orthodoxy  was  never  more  perfectly 
displayed  than  when  St.  John  himself  said  to  the  Lord, 
''Master,  we  saw  one  casting  out  devils  in  Thy  name, 
and  we  forbade  him,  because  he  followeth  not  us." 

I  am  not  prepared  to  trace  the  history  of  the  idea  of 
orthodoxy  and  to  see  how  it  has  given  its  harm  and  help 
in  all  man's  search  for  knowledge,  and  in  all  the  life  and 
progress  of  the  Church.  Everywhere  it  comes  to  this : 
that  the  desire  of  orthodoxy  dwells  on  the  secondary  tests 
and  uses  of  truth,  and  not  upon  the  absolute  e\adence 
and  essential  value  of  the  truth  itself.  It  thinks  of  truth 
as  a  possession  and  as  an  instrument,  not  as  a  being 
whose  very  existence  is  the  subject  of  congratulation  and 
delight. 

Let  us  see  what  some  of  the  ideas  and  impulses  are 
W' liicli  this  character  will  import  into  the  preservation  of 
orthodoxy,  but  which  have  little  or  no  place  in  the  pui*e 
search  for  truth. 

1.  It  mil  make  much  use  and  ^vi'ong  use  of  the  princi- 
ple of  authority.    Authority  as  a  contriliution  to  personal 


188  ESSAYS  AXn  ADDRESSES. 

judgment  is  always  good.  Authority  as  a  substitute  for 
personal  judgment  is  always  bad.  The  first  difficulty, 
though  not  the  deepest,  Hes  of  course  in  the  impossibility 
of  finding  the  authority  in  whom  reliance  can  be  placed. 
The  determination  of  men  that  the}'  will  find  such  an 
authority  results  in  what  ?  Either  in  the  arl^itrary  cloth- 
ing of  a  certain  man  or  group  of  men  with  a  trustworthi- 
ness to  which  a  careful  study  of  their  history  can  give  no 
sanction,  or  else  in  the  amazing  blindness  which  catches 
out  of  the  mouth  of  some  foolish  Vincentius  of  Lerins  a 
definition  which  seriously  ajiplied  would  describe  no  single 
article  of  actual  or  possible  belief,  and  goes  about  talking 
of  Quod  temper  ithique,  et  ah  omnihus,  as  if  there  really  was 
a  practical^le  canon  of  judgment  infolded  in  those  pre- 
cious words.  But  the  real  troul)le  with  authority  is  that 
even  if  the  oracle  were  found,  the  thing  wdiich  its  utter- 
ances would  inspire  in  the  mind  would  not  be  real  belief. 
It  would  not  have  present  reality  and  force.  Authority 
builds  its  system  of  truth  as  if  it  were  a  bridge  resting  on 
piers,  not  as  if  it  were  a  road  with  the  solid  earth  under 
it  all  the  way  along.  There  are  long  stretches  in  which  if 
a  pier  long  past,  or  a  pier  far  ahead,  gives  way,  the  traveler 
is  drowned.  The  traveler  is  always  in  the  power  of  the 
future  and  the  past.  There  is  no  solid  earth  at  the  mo- 
ment under  his  feet.  The  Psalmist's  jiromise  that  "  truth 
shall  flourish  out  of  the  earth"  is  net  fulfilled  to  him. 
The  system  of  orthodoxy  living  upon  the  principle  of 
authority  loses  the  clear  conviction  of  the  present  Christ, 
and  trembles  with  a  sense  of  impiety  when  it  feels  itself 
moved  to  say  that  we  now  are  the  authoritative  Church 
as  much,  nay,  more,  than  the  Cluirch  of  any  most  revered 
of  the  old  centuries. 

2.  Again,  the  idea  of  orthodox}^  is  always  haunted  and 
hindered  by  the  sense  of  the  need  of  immediate  iitility  of 
truths.     This  is  one  of  the  secondary  notions  concerning 


OliTHODOXY.  189 

truth  wliicli  it  is  all  right  to  remember  for  a  while,  and 
which  then  it  becomes  quite  necessary  to  forget.  To  re- 
member it  wlien  it  ought  to  l)e  forgotten  defeats  the  very 
purposes  of  its  remembrance.  Truth  is  always  useful, 
but  to  insist  that  truth  shall  report  itself  every  evening  at 
yom*  counting-house  and  prove  its  usefulness  and  take  its 
wages,  is  almost  certain  to  turn  truth  into  a,  hypocritical 
lie.  And  so  we  find  that  the  lower  orders  of  the  Church's 
workers,  the  mere  runners  of  her  machinery,  have  always 
been  strictl}'  and  scrupulously  orthodox.  While  all  the 
Church's  noblest  servants,  the}^  who  have  opened  to  her 
new  heavens  of  vision  and  new  domains  of  work — Paul, 
Origen,  TertuUian,  Dante,  Abelard,  Luther,  Milton,  Cole- 
ridge, Maurice,  Swedenborg,  Martineau — have  again  and 
again  been  persecuted  for  being  what  they  truly  were, 
unorthodox.  Genius  is  never  orthodox,  and  genius  is  a 
very  useful  thing,  just  because  it  does  not  set  out  to  be 
useful.  And  those  of  us  who  lay  not  the  least  claim  to 
genius  nmst  often  claim  the  privilege  of  genius,  and  cease 
to  ask  whether  a  truth  is  useful  and  simply  ask  whether  it 
is  true. 

3.  It  is  evident  enough  here  that  the  idea  of  wiitii  must 
associate  itself  with  the  idea  of  orthodoxy.  If  unity  is 
thought  of  as  consisting  not  in  sympathy  of  pur]30se  but 
in  identity  of  ideas,  it  must  be  that  the  limited  circle  of 
ideas  in  which  it  is  possible  that  men  should  agree  will  be 
counted  the  true  range  of  human  thought,  and  all  excur- 
L<ions  beyond  tlieir  line  will  lie  looked  on  with  suspicion. 
The  great  conception  of  catholicity  wliich  ought  to  be  in- 
stinct with  the  spirit  of  freedom  is  thus  made  a  power  of 
bondage.  Personal  search  for  truth  disturbs  what  seems 
to  be  the  unity  of  the  Church.  Possessed  Ijy  this  idea, 
much  of  the  speculation  of  religious  writers  is  always 
beset  by  a  second  consideration.  Here  is  the  essential 
limitation  both  of  the  interest  and  the  importance  of  two 


190  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

much-read  and  mnch-talked-of  books  of  our  own  day.  The 
authors  of  "  Lux  Mundi"  and  the  writers  of  "  Progressive 
Orthodoxy  "  alike  are  asking  not  simply  what  is  absolutely 
true,  but  what  can  be  reconciled  to  certain  preestablished 
standards  of  unity,  outside  of  which  they  must  not  go. 
This  makes  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  both  the  books. 
They  have  no  primary  or  intrinsic  vahie.  They  are  un- 
interesting except  as  considered  in  relation  to  the  posi- 
tions of  their  authors.  They  are  rather  psychological 
studies  than  investigations  of  truth.  All  such  secondary 
questions  besetting  an  argument  or  exposition  destroy  its 
reality  and  make  even  the  unity  which  it  tries  to  preserve 
an  artificial  thing,  a  mere  modus  vivendi  of  parties,  con- 
scious of  but  trying  to  conceal  discordance,  rather  than  a 
true  harmony  of  frankly  differing  but  sympathetic  minds. 
4.  Another  notion  by  which  the  thought  of  orthodoxy 
is  inspired  is  the  notion  of  safety.  When  error  is  dreaded 
more  because  of  its  danger  than  because  of  its  untruth,  the 
mind  is  always  on  uncertain  ground.  Whenever  in  dis- 
cussion the  popular  argument  comes  in,  not  that  such  and 
such  a  statement  is  set  forth  on  insufficient  evidence,  but 
that  it  will  do  men  harm  to  believe  it,  the  soil  under  our 
feet  grows  soft  and  treacherous.  Error  is  dangerous,  but 
so  is  truth.  Orthodoxy  is  an  attempt  to  free — shall  we 
not  say  to  rob? — truth  of  its  essential  peril.  Here  comes 
in  the  whole  of  that  misleading  distinction  which  many 
men  love  to  draw  between  essential  and  non-essential 
truths.  "  Essential  for  u'liat  f  "  you  ask ;  and  immediately, 
almost  always,  the  clear  distinction  becomes  mingled  in 
confusion.  In  one  sense  and  for  some  purposes  all  truths 
are  essential ;  in  another  sense  and  for  other  purposes  no 
truth  is  essential ;  truth  and  life  are  always  pressing  on 
each  other.  They  cross  each  other  on  gi'ade,  and  are  al- 
ways in  collision.  Orthodoxy  is  an  attempt  to  carry  truth 
over  life  on  a  safe  bridge.     The  result  of  the  attempt  to 


OBTHODOXY.  191 

make  truth  safe  is  that  what  j-ou  ultimately  make  safe 
is  not  truth.  Every  seeker  after  truth  is  bound  to  feel — 
if  he  is  serious  and  earnest  he  must  feel — the  danger  of 
error.  The  great  question  is  what  effect  that  sense  of  the 
danger  of  error  A\dll  have  upon  hiin :  Will  it  paralyze  or 
will  it  insj^ire  his  search  for  truth?  It  is  good  for  him 
if  it  makes  him  sure  that  there  is  no  chance  for  him  ex- 
cept to  pursue  the  most  cautious  Init  the  most  free  inquiry, 
and  to  leave  the  fortunes  of  Clod's  truth  to  God.  Alas 
for  him  if  it  sends  him  not  to  the  market-place,  Imt  to  the 
napkin,  with  his  talent ;  if  it  sets  him  to  singing  the  timid 
psalm  of  the  man  who  is  thankful  for  the  refuge  of  ortho- 
doxy— "■  Thou  hast  set  my  feet  in  a  small  room." 

5.  There  is  still  one  other  disposition  which  is  very 
strong  in  many  natures,  which  seems  to  find  satisfaction 
under  the  working  of  the  principle  of  orthodoxy,  namely, 
the  disposition  of  fixity.  Perhaps  there  is  nothing  in 
which  men  differ  more  from  one  another  than  in  the  pres- 
ence or  absence  in  them  of  this  disposition.  Fixity  is  as 
necessar}^  to  one  mind  as  change  is  to  another.  Change 
is  as  indispensable  to  this  man  as  fixity  is  to  that.  Wliere 
the  disposition  of  fixity  is  strong,  it  is  among  the  strong- 
est. It  craves  the  satisfaction  of  feeling  the  sameness 
of  truth  not  merely  everywhere  to-day,  but  in  aU  times 
through  history.  It  is  the  perpendicular  identity,  as  unity 
is  the  horizontal  identity  of  thought.  The  only  trouble 
is  that  you  cannot  have — you  have  no  right  to  desu-e — 
fixity  without  finality,  and  ''  the  end  is  not  by  and  by." 
For  in  every  belief  there  are  two  elements,  the  truth  which 
is  believed,  and  the  mind  of  the  man  who  believes  it.  The 
first  of  these  two  elements  is  fixed  and  absolute ;  the  sec- 
ond is  always  variable.  The  same  things  were  true  in  the 
days  of  Augustine  or  Calvin  which  are  true  to-day ;  but 
the  Augustine  or  Calvin  who  is  to  know  their  truth  is 
verv  different  to-dav  from  what  he  was  in  the  fifth  cen- 


192  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

tury,  from  what  he  was  in  the  sixteenth  century.  There- 
fore of  that  faith  in  which  tlie  two  elements  of  truth 
and  the  believing  man  unite,  there  is  no  fixity.  You  can 
only  make  it  seem  as  if  there  were  by  stating  truth  so 
generally  and  abstractly  that  the  human  element  shall  be 
left  out.  This  is  what  orthodoxy  does.  Here  she  per- 
versely seems  to  disown  her  sj)ecial  nature,  and  make  too 
little,  not  too  much,  of  the  personal  element.  She  behaves 
either  as  if  the  human  mind  had  nothing  to  do  with  truth, 
or  as  if  the  human  mind  had  done  all  that  it  had  to  do 
with  truth.  Orthodoxy  is  a  false  crystallization  which  has 
forever  to  be  broken  and  redissolved  in  life.  The  vice 
seems  to  he  in  the  whole  thought  of  the  Church  which  is 
j)ut  in  charge  of  the  truth,  as  if  it  were  a  ship  which  car- 
ried a  deposited  thing  unchanged  from  shore  to  shore, 
and  not  as  if  it  were  a  soil  which  Tiept  a  seed  only  b}^  turn- 
ing it  into  a  tree. 

Authority,  utihty,  unity,  security,  and  fixity — these  then 
are  the  secondary  considerations  which  come  in  to  mingle 
with  the  pure  desire  for  truth  and  turn  it  into  the  preser- 
vation of  orthodoxy.  A  man  sets  out  to  seek  for  what  is 
true.  Little  by  little  it  comes  over  him  that  what  he  is 
to  find  and  hold  must  not  only  be  absolutely  true,  but  it 
must  be  held  by  certain  persons  who  have  special  oppor- 
tunities of  knowing  truth ;  it  must  be  evidently  fitted  for 
doing  the  work  which  the  world  needs  to  have  done ;  it 
must  be  the  same  which  the  great  mass  of  truth-seekers 
are  finding  to  be  true ;  it  must  be  such  that  it  will  bring 
the  man  who  holds  it,  or  the  world  in  which  it  is  held, 
into  no  danger ;  and  it  must  be  identi(ial  with  what  has 
been,  and  is  to  be,  held  in  all  times.  No  doubt  all  these 
conditions  present  themselves  to  the  man's  mind  as  the 
criteria  of  truth.  They  are  the  signs  by  which  he  shall 
know  the  truth  when  he  sees  it.  No  doubt  each  of  them, 
rightly  used,  has  value  of  that  kind.      But  no  doubt. 


ORTHODOXY.  193 

wrongly  used,  each  of  them  is  a  restriction  of  the  abso- 
hiteness  of  the  idea  of  truth,  and  by  the  pressure  of  them 
all  together  that  inner  ring  is  formed  which  we  call  the 
circle  of  orthodoxy,  between  which  and  the  cii'cle  of  truth 
lies  the  zone  of  distrust  and  susj)iciou,  where  men  wander, 
wondering  whether  they  have  any  right  to  wander  thei-e 
at  all,  and  where  men  are  almost  as  ashamed  of  their  tri- 
umphs as  they  are  depressed  at  theii-  defeats.  It  is  the 
power  of  these  secondary  considerations  given  free  play 
in  the  life  that  by  and  by  substitutes  for  the  student  of 
truth,  who  is  humble  and  reverent,  the  champion  of  the 
faith,  who  is  arrogant  and  patronizing. 

Orthodoxy  is,  in  the  Church,  very  inuch  what  prejudice 
is  in  the  single  mind.  It  is  the  premature  conceit  of  cer- 
tainty. It  is  the  treatment  of  the  imperfect  as  if  it  were 
the  perfect.  And  yet  prejudice  is  not  to  be  ruthlessly 
denounced.  It  is  not  only  to  be  accepted  as  inevitable ; 
it,  or  that  for  which  it  stands,  is  to  be  acknowledged  as 
indispensable.  If  prejudice  can  only  be  kept  o^^en  for  re- 
vision and  enlargement,  if  it  can  be  alwaj's  aware  of  its 
partialness  and  imperfection,  then  it  becomes  simply  a 
point  of  departure  for  newer  worlds  of  thought  and  action, 
or,  we  may  say,  a  ivorMng  hypothesis^  which  is  one  stage 
of  the  progress  toward  truth. 

It  is  possible  to  think  of  orthodoxy  in  that  way^  and 
then  it  clearly  manifests  its  uses.  It  does  beyond  all  doubt 
put  into  forms  of  immediate  effectiveness  great  truths 
which  in  their  large  conce]3tion  seem  to  stand  so  far  away 
and  so  to  wait  for  their  full  revelation  that  they  are  hard 
to  apply  to  present  life.  It  does  no  doubt  seem  to  make 
capable  of  transportation  and  transmission  truths  which 
in  their  deeper  spirituahty  it  is  not  easy  to  think  of  except 
as  the  sacred  and  secret  possession  of  the  individual  soul. 
It  has  no  doubt  served  to  carry  the  Church  over,  as  it 
were,  some  of  those  periods  of  depressed  and  weakened 


194  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

vitality  whieli  come  between  the  exalted  and  spontaneous 
conditions  which  are  its  true  life.  The  same  service,  per- 
haps, it  renders  also  to  the  personal  experience,  bridging 
the  sad  chasms  between  the  rock  of  behef  on  this  side  and 
the  rock  of  belief  on  that  side  with  the  wooden  structure 
of  conformity. 

These,  briefly  stated,  are  the  uses  of  orthodoxy.  Against 
these  meager  uses  are  to  be  set  the  vastly  predominant 
evil  which  the  w^hole  principle  of  orthodoxy  brings  to  per- 
sonal freedom  and  reahty,  on  one  side,  and  to  the  purity 
and  extension  of  truth  upon  the  other.  The  indictment 
which  can  be  sustained  against  it  is  tremendous.  Ortho- 
doxy begins  by  setting  a  false  standard  of  life.  It  makes 
men  asjDire  after  soundness  in  the  faith  rather  tha.n  after 
richness  in  the  truth.  It  exalts  possessions  over  character, 
makes  more  of  truths  than  of  truthfulness,  talks  about 
truths  as  if  they  were  things  which  were  quite  separated 
from  the  truth-holder,  things  which  he  might  take  in  his 
hand  and  pass  to  his  neighbor  without  their  passing  into 
and  through  his  nature.  It  makes  possible  an  easy  trans- 
mission of  truth,  but  only  by  the  deadening  of  truth,  as 
a  butcher  freezes  meat  in  order  to  carry  it  across  the  sea. 
Orthodoxy  discredits  and  discourages  inquiry,  and  has 
made  the  name  of  "  free-thinker,"  which  ought  to  be  a 
crown  and  glory,  a  stigma  of  disgrace.  It  puts  men  in 
the  base  and  demorahzing  position  in  which  they  apolo- 
gize for  seeking  new  truth.  It  is  responsible  for  a  large 
l^art  of  the  defiant  liberalism  which  not  merely  disbelieves 
the  orthodox  dogma,  but  disbelieves  it  with  a  sense  of 
attempted  wrong  and  of  triumphant  escape.  It  is  ortho- 
doxy, and  not  truth,  which  has  done  the  persecuting.  The 
inquisitions  and  dungeons  and  social  ostracisms  for  opin- 
ion's sake  belong  to  it.  And  in  the  truths  which  it 
holds  it  loses  discrimination  and  delicate  sense  of  values, 
holding  them  not  for  their  truth  so  much  as  for  their  use 


ORTHODOXY.  195 

or  their  safety ;  it  gives  them  a  rude  and  general  identity, 
and  misses  the  subtle  difference  which  makes  each  truth 
separate  from  every  other.  Orthodoxy  deals  in  coarse 
averages.  It  makes  of  the  world  of  truth  a  sort  of  dollar- 
store,  wherein  a  few  things  are  rated  below  their  real  value 
for  the  sake  of  making  a  host  of  other  things  pass  for 
more  than  they  are  worth,  and  in  the  lives  of  those  who 
live  by  it  orthodoxy  makes  no  appeal  to  poetry  or  imagi- 
nation There,  too,  it  delights  in  the  average  condition. 
It  would  maintain  the  sea  of  belief  and  emotion  at  one 
fixed  level.  It  would  give  no  place  on  one  hand  to  great 
floods  of  fulness  which  upHft  the  soul,  nor  on  the  other 
to  pathetic  periods  of  ebb  and  emptiness  which  lay  bare 
its  deepest,  most  unsatisfied  desires.  It  has  its  own  tu- 
mults of  the  lower  sort,  tumults  of  envy  and  contempt,  of 
suspicion  and  dislike,  which  it  stirs  in  human  minds,  but 
the  loftiest  and  profoundest  passions  a,nd  struggles  it 
catches  sight  of  only  to  shudder  at  and  denounce. 

These  are  the  evil  things  which  the  spirit  of  orthodoxy 
does  and  is,  all  of  which  sum  themselves  up  in  this — that 
it  is  born  of  fear,  and  has  no  natural  lieritage  either  from 
hope  or  love. 

The  Greek  Church  stands  for  orthodoxy.  The  Latin 
Church  stands  for  catholicity.  Protestantism  stands  for 
truth.  The  Church  of  Rome  and  Protestantism  both  fail 
in  large  degree  of  those  great  ends  on  which  their  hearts 
are  set.  But  the  ends  are  great,  and  their  hearts  are  truly 
set  on  them.  But  the  Greek  Church  is  dead  because  the 
thing  it  cherishes  and  worships  is  not  a  living  thing. 
And  where  that  thing  becomes  the  desire  and  idol  of  any 
soul,  that  soul,  too,  loses  its  vitality. 

It  all,  then,  comes  to  this :  that  the  idea  of  orthodoxy 
is  a  natural  idea  and  will  always  present  itself  and  claim 
men's  interest.  But  it  must  be  compelled  to  know^  its  very 
inferior  importance  and  to  keep  its  very  inferior  place. 


19G  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

It  is  an  arrogant  and  pushing  thing.  It  is  alwaj^s  crowd- 
ing itself  into  thrones  where  it  has  no  right.  So  long  as 
it  simply  represents  the  temporary  and  local  coincidence 
of  opinion,  furnishing  the  general  meeting-ground  for 
minds  which  have  reached  about  the  same  degree  of  truth ; 
so  long  as  it  thinks  of  itself  as  a  convenient  expedient 
for  enabling  Christians  to  understand  each  other  and  to 
work  together ;  so  long  as  it  joyfully  recognizes  that  there 
are  regions  of  truth  supremely  true  outside  itself,  and  sees 
brave  and  devout  spirits  going  forth  into  those  regions 
and  gives  them  cordial  Godspeed — so  long  it  is  absolutely 
good.  As  soon  as  it  tries  to  set  bounds  to  reverent  thought 
and  speculation  it  is  bad,  and  by  a  noble  laAV  of  their  na- 
ture men  will  feel  its  badness,  and  it  wiU.  lose  its  power 
over  them. 

We  cannot  but  believe  that  in  the  future  the  whole 
conception  of  orthodoxy  is  destined  to  grow  less  and  les^ 
prominent.  Less  and  less  men  will  ask  of  any  opinion, 
"Is  it  orthodox?"  More  and  more  they  will  ask,  "Is  it 
true  ? "  More  and  more  the  belief  in  the  absolute  safety 
of  the  freest  truth-seeking,  in  truth-seeking  as  the  only 
safe  work  of  the  human  mind,  will  deepen  and  increase. 
Truth  will  come  to  seem  not  a  deposit,  fixed  and  limited, 
but  an  infinite  domain  wherein  the  soul  is  bidden  to  range 
with  insatiable  desire,  guarded  only  by  the  care  of  God 
above  it  and  the  Spirit  of  God  within  it,  educated  by  its 
mistakes,  and  attaining  larger  knowledge  only  as  it  at- 
tains complete  purity  of  purpose  and  thoroughness  of  de- 
votion and  energy  of  hope.  As  that  truer  understanding 
of  what  truth  is  grows  wide  and  clear,  men  will  cease  to 
talk  or  think  much  of  orthodoxy,  and  the  humble  service 
which  it  is  made  to  render  it  will  render  aU  the  better 
when  it  is  stripped  of  the  purple  and  the  scepter,  the  do- 
minion and  tyranny,  to  which  it  has  no  right. 

Is  not  the  sum  of  the  whole  matter  this — that  orthodoxy 


ORTHODOXY.  197 

as  a  jirineiple  of  action  or  a  standard  of  lielief  is  obsolete 
and  dead '?  It  is  not  that  the  substance  of  orthodoxy  has 
been  altered,  but  tliat  the  very  principle  of  orthodoxy  has 
been  essentially  disowned.  It  is  not  conceivable  now  that 
any  council,  however  ecumenically  constituted,  should  so 
pronounce  on  truth  that  its  decrees  should  have  any 
weight  with  thinking  men,  save  what  might  seem  legiti- 
mately to  belong  to  the  character  and  wisdom  of  the  per- 
sons who  composed  the  council.  Personal  judgment  is  on 
the  throne,  and  will  remain  there — personal  judgment, 
enlightened  by  all  the  wisdom,  past  or  present,  which  it 
can  summon  to  its  aid,  but  forming  finally  its  own  con- 
clusions and  standing  l)y  them  in  the  sight  of  God,  whether 
it  stands  in  a  great  company  or  stands  alone. 


THE   CONDITIONS   OF   CHURCH   GROWTH  IN 
MISSIONARY   LANDS. 

(Churc'li  Congress  of  Protestant  Episcopal  Clmreli,  Philadelphia,  Pa., 
ISoveniber  13,  1890.  j 

Mr.  President,  Ladies,  and  Gentlemen  :  Both  of  the 
gentlemeD  who  have  been  reading  to  us  this  evening  liave 
begun  with  the  statement  of  the  immense  importance  of 
the  subject  with  which  we  are  called  upon  to  deal.  I  may 
remind  you  that  the  more  important  a  subject  is  the  more 
we  are  led,  in  dealing  with  it,  to  revert  to  its  largest 
principles.  In  considering  subjects  which  come  before  us 
we  may  allow  a  multitude  of  complicated  circumstances 
to  distract  our  minds,  but  as  soon  as  anything  seems  to 
be  of  great  importance  it  lays  hold  of  the  sense  of  respon- 
sibility in  us  and  becomes  absolutely  simple.  We  have 
not  been  able  to  shut  out  from  our  minds  the  thought  of 
the  religious  character  of  heathen  life,  the  religious  ele- 
ment which  is  always  pi'csent  there.  We  cannot  speak 
of  that  religious  character  in  any  disparaging  or  narrow 
terms.  It  is  to  be  recognized,  in  the  completeness  which 
belongs  to  it,  as  a  part  of  the  universal  manifestation  of 
the  Fatherhood  of  God  to  man.  His  child.  Everywhere 
throughout  the  world  God  has  made  Himself  known  to 
His  children.  He  is  making  Himself  kuown  to  His  chil- 
dren everywhere  to-day.  It  is  not  a  mere  relic  of  some 
primary  revelation,  as  we  have  sometimes  heard.  Our 
estimate  of  it  is  a  distinct  and  cordial  recognition  that  in 
no  part  of  the  world  is  there  a  child  of  the  Father  to  whom 

198 


CHUIICH   GllOWTH  IX  MIHiilOXAllY  LANDS.        199 

the  Father  is  not  manifesting  Himself  to-dav  with  all  the 
abundance  of  which  that  child's  lite  is  capable.  There  is 
no  religious  life  in  the  world  that  is  not  of  the  Spirit  of 
Christ.  There  is  no  hfe  to  which  the  missionarj'  goes  in 
heathenism  to  wliich  he  has  not  freely  to  say,  ''  There  is 
the  work  of  Him  whom  I  preach  to  you."  That,  it  seems 
to  me,  lies  at  the  ^-ery  basis  of  the  thought  of  the  way  in 
which  the  great  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  is  to  be  built  up 
in  the  lands  of  heathenism. 

Then  comes  the  question  as  to  the  way  in  which  that 
which  has  been  plainh'  committed,  to  us  is  to  be  communi- 
cated to  this  great  heathen  world.  God  has  committed  to 
certain  parts  of  the  world  that  message  which  He  would 
have  communicated  to  all.  It  must  of  necessity  be  that 
any  truth  carried  and  spread  abroad  from  certain  centers 
must  have  advantages  and  disadvantages  which  belong 
to  such  a  method  of  its  extension.  The  advantages  are 
clear  enough.  In  the  first  place,  it  carries  with  it  that 
power  of  testimony ;  it  is  the  declaration  of  that  Avliich  is 
already  tested  and  proved  and  developed  in  the  life  of 
those  who  have  already  lived  under  its  power.  In  the 
second  place,  there  are  certain  large,  suggestive  forms  of 
its  organization  and  development  Avhich  have  appeared  in 
the  history  of  lands  that  have  been  long  Christian.  In  the 
thu-d  place,  there  iz  the  power  of  Christian  love  which 
gives  impetus  and  force  to  the  message  which  goes  from 
the  Christian  to  the  unchristian  world.  These  are  the 
great  advantages,  I  take  it,  of  missionary  effort. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  are  certain  disadvantages 
which  come  by  necessity  from  such  a  method  of  communi- 
cation of  the  truth,  which  would  not  come  if  it  were  sud- 
denly dropped  out  of  the  sky  or  sprang  from  the  earth, 
under  men's  feet.  There  is,  first,  the  fact  that  much  has 
mingled  itself  ^A\h.  the  very  nature  of  the  religion  which 
we  would  extend,  which  has  been  associated  with  our  long 


200  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

and  loving  experience  of  it.  And  a  second  disadvantage 
of  the  missionary  method  of  eommnnicating  trnth  lies  in 
the  natnral  disposition  to  communicate  the  form  of  organ- 
ization of  spiritual  life.  The  fixity  of  religious  methods 
and  ceremonies  has,  again  and  again,  hindered  that  whicli 
has  to  go  into  the  great  stream  of  human  life  from  close 
and  absolute  communion  witli  that  life.  In  the  thii'd 
place,  there  is  the  fact  that  all  which  constitutes  the  civil- 
ization of  Christian  lands,  the  evil  as  well  as  the  good, 
goes  together  to  the  new  lands  which  it  invades.  The 
ship  carries  across  the  sea  at  once  the  missionary  and  the 
wliisky.  The  force  which  sends  across  to  heathen  lands 
the  energ}^,  the  vitality,  and  the  spirituality  of  a  Christian 
countrj^  sends  at  the  same  time  the  eovetousness  and  cor- 
ruption of  its  people.  It  is  our  Christian  civilization  with 
all  tlie  stains  and  pollutions  of  it  Avhich  goes  "with  our 
missionary  brethren  across  the  sea.  And  this  grow\s  more 
and  more  clear  as  each  land  is  opened  to  the  invasion  of 
other  lands. 

These  are  some  of  the  advantages  and  disadvantages 
which  are  mingled  in  the  missionary  work  of  those  Avho 
all  believe  in  a  certain  truth,  and  are  disciples  of  a  certain 
Master.  We  can  see  the  same  mingling  of  advantage  and 
disadvantage  in  the  communication  of  truth  from  parents 
to  children.  "We  can  see  the  same  in  the  New  Testament, 
where  the  religion  of  Judaism  at  once  lent  its  strength 
and  communicated  its  impressions  to  the  earliest  Chris- 
tianity of  Christendom.  The  total  result  of  such  a  condi- 
tion of  things  will  show  us  what  must  be  some  of  the  con- 
ditions of  Church  growth  in  missionary  lands.  We  have 
ah-eady  been  pointed  to  the  necessity  of  a  native  minis- 
try as  absolutely  essential  to  the  conversion  of  a  heathen 
country. 

Equally  necessary  is  a  native  literature.  The  true 
Church  of  Clirist  in  any  land  can  never  be  built  up  and 


OEUnCH   GBOWTH  IN  MISSIONARY  LANDS.        201 

fed  by  the  communication  of  thought  through  a  translated 
literature  or  books  which  have  been  shaped  by  the  neces- 
sities of  foreign  lands.  Along  with  the  native  literature, 
it  seems  to  me,  we  must,  by  and  by,  come  to  a  native 
architecture  for  the  churches.  On  the  heights  of  Leba- 
non, in  the  streets  of  Tokio,  and  in  the  jungles  of  India, 
it  cannot  be  that  the  true  church  building  shall  be  per- 
manently the  poor  copy  of  such  temples  as  exist  in  West- 
ern lands.  There  must  be  also,  as  early  as  possible,  in 
every  land  that  which  will  truly  be  the  Church  of  that 
land.  Coloniahsm  must  speedily  pass  away.  There  must 
be  no  reproduction  of  the  melancholy  history  of  the  early 
days  of  our  own  Church  in  this  countiy.  And  of  neces- 
sity, I  claim  as  one  of  the  essential  requisites  of  our 
Church's  work  abroad  that  it  shall  be  in  cordial  com- 
munication with  the  work  of  all  Christians  of  all  names, 
not  as  an  unfortunate  necessity,  but  with  joyous  thanks- 
giving for  all  that  they  are  doing.  I  can  picture  to  my- 
self a  certain  sort  of  despairing  heroism  in  the  condition 
of  those  two  missionaries  of  om-  Church  who,  we  are  told, 
stood  the  other  day,  in  the  midst  of  all  the  gathered  mis- 
sionaries of  China,  the  sole  representatives  of  our  com- 
munion. I  cannot  picture  to  myself  the  condition  of 
mind  in  which  they  stood  there  excepting  as  in  absolute 
sympathy  with  all  their  brethren  who  were  doing  precisely 
the  same  work  that  \l\ey  were  doing,  who  were  seeking 
the  same  great  ends,  and  were  to  be  satisfied  with  the 
same  results.  I  cannot  help  saying  that  I  always  feel 
that  it  is  to  be  the  privilege  of  that  heathen  world  to  ex- 
ercise some  power  backward  to  help  us  in  the  life  wdiich 
we  are  living  here.  It  is  no  imagination,  no  mere  foolish 
dream.  If  the  missionaries  of  America,  of  every  name, 
could  meet  upon  the  shore  as  they  leave  their  own  land, 
could  sail  together  across  the  ocean,  and,  linking  hands 
in  those  days  in  which  their  Avork  growls  clear  to  them, 


202  ESSAYS  A^'D  AD DE ESSES. 

could  stand  apart  at  last  on  the  other  shore,  knowing  that 
what  they  had  to  do  was  absolutely  and  entu-ely  one,  for- 
getting every  difference  that  separated  them  from  one 
another,  leaving  behind  all  that  had  made  their  work  at 
home  divided  and  distinct,  then,  I  believe,  we  might  lift 
up  our  hearts  with  hope,  and  in  a  short  time  should  find 
our  hearts  aglow  with  triumph. 

Another  thing  seems  to  me  to  be  true :  that  whatever 
the  missionary  Church  presents  to  the  heathen  to  which 
it  makes  its  appeal  it  must  present  upon  the  divine  war- 
rant of  its  practical  usefulness.  If  I  believed  that  the 
threefold  organization  of  the  Christian  ministry  was  so 
bound  up  with  the  existence  of  the  Cliristian  Church  that 
without  it  there  could  be  no  Church,  I  never  would  pre- 
sent it  to  the  heathen  world,  except  in  such  a  way  that  it 
should  have  the  opportunity  to  testify  of  its  divinity  by 
the  power  Avhich  it  should  display  to  give  eif ectiveness, 
solidity,  and  lichness  to  the  life  to  which  it  made  its  offer. 
I  do  not  believe  that  the  threefold  organization  of  the 
Christian  ministry  or  the  existence  of  the  episcopate  is 
essential  to  the  being  of  a  Christian  Chm-ch,  but  I  am 
ready  enough  to  hope  and  to  expect  that  something  cor- 
responding to  it  would  come  forth  in  the  development 
of  the  new  Christian  life,  as  it  came  forth  in  the  devel- 
opment of  the  life  of  the  Chm-ch  of  the  Apostles'  time. 
There  is,  it  is  true,  warrant  as  the  intention  and  will  of 
God ;  there  is  the  divine  purpose  manifested  in  it.  All 
missionary  work  must  start  with  absolute  simplicity  of 
dogma.  It  is  inevitable  that  truth  should  draw  to  itself 
that  with  which  it  has  been  associated  in  the  individual 
life ;  but  when  truth  passes  out  from  life  to  life,  it  once 
more  gathers  itself  into  its  simplicity.  It  presents  itself 
to  the  new  life,  sure  that  in  the  experience  of  that  life  it 
will  once  more  be  developed  into  complexity  and  riclmess. 
But  it  offers  itself  in  its  pure  and  simple  substance,  and 


CHURCH   GROWTH  IX  MISSIOXARY  LAXDS.        203 

leaves  for  the  development  of  time  an  api)lication  wLich 
must  be  a  separate  and  novel  thing-  for  each  new  mission 
as  for  each  new  soul. 

These,  it  seems  to  me,  are  the  conditions  of  Church 
^owth  in  missionary  lands,  which  it  is  possible  for  us  to 
lay  down :  in  the  first  place,  simplicity  in  bringing  our 
truth  and  the  knowledge  of  our  Savioui*  to  the  new  land 
whicli  tliey  are  to  rule;  in  the  second  place,  absolute  lib- 
erty for  that  new  land  to  develop  the  truth  in  the  service 
of  the  Saviour  in  its  own  form  and  way;  in  the  third 
place,  a  geniiine  respect  for  those  to  whom  we  go ;  and  in 
the  fourth  place,  a  distinct  expectation  that  the  mangled 
bit  of  Christendom  which  we  behold  to-day  is  to  be  en- 
larged and  filled  out  with  that  which  shaU  come  back  to 
it  fi'om  heathen  lands.  These  conditions  must  exist  in 
the  soul  of  the  missionary,  and  under  them  the  Church  in 
missionary  lands  must  grow. 

There  is  to  come  no  universality  and  no  perpetuity  of 
Christian  life  throughout  the  world,  except  b}^  the  sim- 
plicity of  Christian  faith,  in  obedience  to  Jesus  Christ,  and 
in  the  unity  of  aU  Christians  in  virtue  of  that  obedience. 
When  that  has  come  about,  then  we  may  look  for  mission- 
ary triumphs,  then  we  may  look  for  the  growing  of  the 
Church  of  Jesus,  which  is  the  expression  of  the  world's 
obedience  to  Him  uttered  in  a  multitude  of  forms,  and 
operative  always  to  the  same  great  end  of  the  redemption 
of  human  life,  the  salvation  of  human  character. 


THE   TEACHABLENESS   OF   RELIOION. 

(The  Twenty  Chib,  Boston,  Mass.,  1892.) 

There  is  a  universal  desire  on  the  part  of  religious 
people  to  impart  to  others  that  which  is  the  treasure  and 
inspiration  of  their  life.  It  is  a  recognized  law  of  the 
spiritual  experience  that  the  truth  which  is  not  imparted 
withers,  and  the  character  which  is  satisfied  with  its  own 
attainment  dies. 

And  yet  there  always  has  been  and  there  is  to-day  a 
certain  inevitable  misgiving  with  regard  to  the  possibility 
of  giving  to  others  that  which  we  are  sure  that  God  has 
given  us.  Men  who  believe  that  natural  science  and 
political  economy  may  be  satisfactorily  expounded  by  the 
professor  to  his  class  of  pupils  believe  that  religion  is  un- 
teachable.  Some  sense  of  the  fineness  and  subtlety  and 
also  of  the  intense  personalness  of  spiritual  truth  makes 
it  seem  incommunicable.  It  must  lose  its  essential  quality 
as  it  passes  from  lip  to  ear,  from  mind  to  mind. 

This  misgiving  shows  itself  in  a  crude  way  in  the  fa- 
miliar talk  of  many  people  who,  holding  a  true  Christian 
faith  themselves,  declare  that  they  will  never  undertake  to 
teach  their  children  to  be  Christians.  The  children  must 
find  their  own  faith  as  they  groAV  up.  They  must  think 
for  themselves. 

The  same  misgiving  also  appears  in  every  mystic  search 
for  the  direct  illumination  which  must  come  directly  from 
the  Source  of  Light,  and  can  be  reflected  from  no  jewel, 
however  pure  or  precious.     The  Hindoo  sitting  by  the 

204 


THE   TEACHABLENESS   OF  RELIGION.  205 

Ganges,  Buddha  under  bis  bo-tree,  have  no  faith  in  any- 
teaching  of  rehgion.  The  most  that  the  oriental  priest 
tries  to  do  for  liis  disciple  is,  by  ascetic  practices  and  tlie- 
osophic  rituals,  to  make  a  state  of  soul  into  which  the 
unhindered  truth  can  flow  out  of  the  burning  central  soul 
of  God. 

Between  these  two  extremes,  so  far  from  each  other, 
the  same  misgiving  constantly  appears  and  reappears  in 
many  ways.  It  has  at  least  this  significance  :  it  indicates 
that  if  religion  is  indeed  capable  of  being  taught  at  all,  it 
must  be  taught  in  a  way  peculiar  to  itself,  which  gets  its 
character  from  the  nature  of  that  which  the  teacher  is 
trying  to  communicate  to  his  disciple. 

And  there  is  nothing  strange  in  that.  All  teaching- 
varies  in  its  character  with  the  changes  of  the  three  ele- 
ments which  enter  into  it.  These  elements  are  the  teacher, 
the  learner,  and  the  subject-matter  which  is  taught  and 
learned.  The  third  element  is  most  of  all  impoi-tant.  It 
entirely  controls  the  method  of  instruction ;  and  so  it  is 
not  strange  that  when  men  think  about  teaching  religion 
and  have  no  richer  thought  about  what  teaching  is  than 
that  which  they  have  gathered  from  their  experience  in 
imparting  facts  of  science  or  of  history,  their  attempts  to 
teach  religion  should  seem  woeful  failures,  and  by  and  by 
they  should  faU  back  on  the  conviction  that  religion  is 
unteachable,  and  send  their  scholars  out  for  the  sun  to 
shine  on  and  the  winds  to  blow  on  in  the  vague  hope  that 
so  they  may  somehow  gather  the  knowledge  which  the 
teacher  is  powerless  to  give. 

This,  then,  is  fundamental.  The  method  of  teaching 
anything  must  depend  upon  the  natm^e  of  the  thing  which 
is  taught.  The  method  of  teaching  religion  must  depend 
upon  the  nature  of  religion.  And  no  definition  of  religion 
satisfies  us  except  that  which  declares  that  it  is  the  com- 
pleteness of  the  life  of  man.     We  are  always  taking  man 


20G  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

apart  and  treating  him  in  fragments.  Every  highest  con- 
sideration of  liim  insists  upon  the  restoration  of  his  unity. 
The  total  man,  like  every  total,  is  more  than  the  sum  of 
his  parts.  He  has  a  quality  in  his  entire  life  which  no 
examination  of  his  partial  qualities  can  account  for.  This 
is  the  most  significant  fact  concerning  him.  Without  the 
clearest  and  most  constant  recognition  of  this  fact  all 
treatment  of  him  is  confused  and  ineffective. 

Religion  is  the  completeness  of  tlie  life  of  man.  Relig- 
ion then  lives  in  this  truth  of  human  unity.  Whatever 
else  you  may  impart  to  any  portion  of  the  di\dded  human- 
ity— as  learning  to  the  human  intellect,  or  strength  to  the 
human  body,  or  vision  to  the  human  imagination — relig- 
ion must  be  imparted  to  the  total  man.  It  is  not  possi- 
ble, strictly,  to  speak  or  think  of  a  religious  intellect  or  a 
religious  body  or  a  religious  imagination :  you  must  think 
of  a  religious  man.  St.  Paul  prays  for  his  Thessalonians 
that  their  whole  body  and  soul  and  spirit  might  be  pre- 
served blameless ;  but  these  are  only  fragments  of  his 
larger  prayer — "The  very  God  of  Peace  sanctify  yon 
wholly."  And  sanctification  does  not  put  on  its  fullest 
meaning  till  we  hear  the  Divine  Man  declaring,  *'  I  sanctify 
Myself." 

This  is  the  first  fact  concerning  the  nature  of  religion, 
whicli  must  always  dominate  the  method  of  its  teaching. 
It  belongs  to  the  whole  man  in  his  unity.  It  is  a  posses- 
sion, a  condition,  a  quality  of  the  total,  un divided  human 
life. 

And  from  this  follows  the  first  necessity  of  religious 
teaching,  which  is  that,  as  it  is  to  reach  and  occupy  a  total 
being,  so  it  must  issue  from  an  entire  life.  However  it 
may  for  the  moment  present  itself  as  duty  to  be  done, 
truth  to  be  apprehended,  or  emotion  to  be  felt,  it  must 
start  in  its  origin  from  a  source  which  includes  all  these, 
and  which  also,  besides  its  inclusion  of  these  elements, 


THE    TEACHABLENESS   OF  EELIGION.  207 

has  in  itself  a  quality  a^reater  tliau  the  sum  of  all  these 
elements  which  it  includes,  a  quality  answering'  to  the 
unity  or  totality  of  the  humanity  to  which  religion  pro- 
ceeds and  from  which  it  offei'S  itself. 

Nothing  can  fulfil  these  conditions  except  personality. 
Nothing  can  match  and  correspond  with  personal  unity 
but  the  unity  of  a  person,  and  therefore  we  are  led  at 
once  to  the  conclusion  that  all  teaching  of  religion  must 
be  included  within  the  communication  of  personal  life. 
Whatever  be  its  details,  they  must  all  be  inspired  and 
directed  by  the  truth  that  what  is  going  on  and  what  thej'' 
minister  to  is  the  approval  of  a  total  person  to  a  total 
person — and  the  person  who  approaches  is  God — the 
person  who  is  approached  is  man. 

If  with  this  statement  in  our  ears  we  turn  and  suddenly 
open  the  New  Testament,  do  we  not  feel  the  great  Book 
filled  with  the  confirmation  of  it  f  The  great  word  faith, 
which  shines  on  every  page,  is  the  word  of  personal  rela- 
tionship. x\s  soon  as  it  is  separated  from  personality  it 
grows  unmeaning  or  confused.  The  failure  of  every 
attempt  to  digest  the  New  Testament  into  a  system  of 
dogma  or  a  code  of  law  comes  from  the  presence  of  per- 
sonal life  and  love  beating  through  it  and  breaking  the 
limitations  of  law  and  dogma  by  a  higher,  ii-repressible 
vitality.  It  is  the  book  of  a  Person.  And  when  that  Per- 
son manifests  Himself  not  merely  as  truth  but  as  teacher, 
not  merely  as  the  power  to  be  received  but  as  the  type  of 
the  everlasting  method  of  its  reception,  it  is  impossible  to 
make  Him  seem  a  mere  teacher  in  the  ordinary  and  lim- 
ited meanings  of  that  word — life  pressed  on  life— not 
merely  a  voice  to  be  heard,  but  a  friend  to  be  loved,  a 
shepherd  to  be  followed,  a  bread  to  be  eaten  ;  so  does  the 
Christ  of  the  Gospels  present  Himself  in  word  and  sacra- 
ment and  every  presentation  of  His  personality. 

This  fixes,  I  conceive,  the  first  great  general  conception 


208  L'SSAYS  Ayn  addeesses. 

of  the  teacliing  of  religion  which  must  decree  its  character 
and  regulate  all  of  its  details.  It  must  be,  not  the  im- 
parting of  truth,  but  the  presentation  of  a  person.  What 
the  true  teacher  of  rehgion  does  is  not  to  declare  and 
prove  certain  propositions  to  be  true.  It  is  to  introduce 
man  to  God,  that  the  total  divine  nature  may  move  upon 
the  total  human  nature  and  the  perfect  unity  of  God  and 
man  be  reached. 

Within  this  conception  of  the  teaching  of  religion  the 
most  detailed  instruction  may  have  its  place,  but  it  loses 
its  power  if  it  is  taken  outside  of  this  conception.  Ee- 
ligion  instantly  becomes  irreligious  if  you  carry  it  away 
from  its  great  enveloping  truth  of  the  mystic  union  of 
God  and  man.  Mysticism  is  the  heart  of  religion,  without 
whose  ever-beating  life  the  hands  of  religion  which  do  the 
work,  and  the  mind  of  religion  which  studies  and  thinks, 
fall  dead. 

The  invitation,  "  Come  to  Jesus,"  is  not  then  the  un- 
meaning cry  of  a  fervid  exhorter  who  has  lost  his  head 
and  says  whatever  hot  words  come  easiest.  It  is  the  exact 
utterance  of  the  Teacher  of  religion  describing  what  His 
disciple  is  to  do.  It  is  the  j)erf  ect  echo  of  what  Christ  the 
great  Teacher  of  religion  was  perpetually  saying,  "  Come 
unto  Me"  and  "Come  through  Me  to  the  Father."  It 
describes  a  complete  experience  in  which  are  infolded  the 
communication  of  knowledge,  the  imposition  of  command- 
ment, the  awakening  of  affection,  but  which  is  greater 
than  the  sum  of  all  these,  as  the  whole  is  always  greater 
than  the  sum  of  its  parts.  It  declares  the  type  of  religious 
communication  to  be  not  a  lesson  learned  but  a  ft-iendship 
established. 

And  it  is  not  possible,  I  think,  to  maintain  the  distinc- 
tion which  is  often  di'awn  between  teaching  religion  and 
teaching  theology.  If  you  teach  rehgion  you  must  teach 
theoloffv.     You  can  no  more  leave  out  the  element  of 


THE   TEACHABLEXESS   OF  RELIGION.  209 

definite  intelligible  truth  than  you  can  leave  out  the  ele- 
ment of  earnest  feeling  or  of  the  obedient  will.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  you  teach  theology  you  must  teach  rehgion. 
If  the  "heart  makes  the  theologian"  it  is  impossible  to 
conceive  of  the  enlightenment  of  the  intelligence  as  the 
complete  process  of  theological  instruction.  The  preacher 
in  his  pidpit  and  the  professor  in  his  chau*  are  doing  the 
same  work.  They  are  both  bringing  man  to  God  and  Ijid- 
ding  him  hear  the  words  which  God  is  speaking. 

With  this  clear  sight  of  religion  as  something  which 
proceeds  from  the  personality  of  God  and  reaches  the 
personality  of  man,  we  are  compelled  to  feel  that  any 
means  of  communication  which  come  between  God  and 
man,  any  subordinate  teacherships,  must  also  be  personal, 
and  can  be  effective  just  in  proportion  to  the  clearness 
and  warmth  of  then*  personal  nature.  You  cannot  teach 
religion  by  a  book.  It  is  not  the  New  Testament  which 
teaches  religion  to  the  Christian  world.  It  is  Christ 
whom  the  New  Testament  makes  a  hving  Person  and 
through  whom  God  shows  Himself  to  us  as  He  showed 
Himself  to  the  Magdalen  and  the  Apostles.  And  the 
great  teachers  of  religion  who  have  done  \h&  most  Christ- 
like woi"k  have  always  been  those  whose  jDcrsonality  has 
been  most  complete  and  who  have  been  in  truest  human 
relation  to  the  souls  they  taught.  Parents,  friends,  pas- 
tors, have  been  the  truest  teachers  of  rehgion.  The  work 
of  scientific  theologians  has  come  to  practical  effectiveness 
through  them. 

And  they  have  been  effective  simply  as  they  kept  their 
humanity  beating  and  quivering  like  a  living  atmosphere 
between  the  life  of  God  and  the  life  of  man,  so  that  all  the 
life  together  made  one  open  system  through  which  light 
could  pour.  The  minute  they  closed  themselves  to  God 
their  power  of  teaehership  was  gone.  They  could  give 
ideas,  but  they  could  not  awaken  life,  and  religion  is  life. 


210  ESSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

Here  is  tlie  limitation  of  all  teacliersliip.  It  can  create 
nothing.  It  can  only  awaken,  or  rather,  it  can  open  itself 
into  a  medium  through  which  God  may  claim  Himself  in 
the  disciple's  soul.  "I  knew  all  about  God  before  you 
told  me,"  said  little  blind,  deaf,  dumb  Helen  Kellar  to  me 
one  day,  "  only  I  did  not  know  His  name."  It  was  a  per- 
fect expression  of  the  innateness  of  the  divine  idea  in  the 
human  mind,  of  the  belonging  of  the  liu,inan  soul  to  God, 
and  of  the  limits  of  the  teacher's  power. 

Next  to  these  nearest  persons  there  comes  close  upon 
our  nature  the  vast  personalit}'  of  man.  Hmnanity,  and 
all  that  contact  with  humanity  which  we  call  life,  becomes 
our  teacher  of  religion — life  as  the  manifold  interpreter 
of  God,  as  the  first  awakener  of  those  powers  which  any 
specific  commandment  must  direct,  as  the  first  suggestion 
of  those  questions  to  Avhich  any  particular  revelation  must 
give  answer.  Life,  personally  conceived  as  the  pressure 
of  the  universal  humanitj'  on  the  individual  human  nature, 
must  always  ha.ve  its  place  as  the  greatest  and  broadest 
approach  of  God  to  man.  This  found  its  perfection  in 
the  Incarnation.  Through  the  divine  humanity  of  Jesus 
God  was  manifest  in  the  flesh,  and  therefore  all  that  Jesus 
taught  and  ever  teaches,  whether  b}^  word  or  action,  is 
the  consummation  and  fulfilment  of  that  presentation  of 
Himself  which  God  is  ever  making  through  humanity  to 
man.  That  which  had  struggled  through  the  imperfect 
medium  as  law  shone  in  its  brightness  through  the  Son 
of  God  as  grace  and  truth. 

And  if  the  Church  is  in  one  thought  of  it  the  ever- 
present  Christ,  and  in  another  thought  of  it  is  the  ideal 
human  society,  then  the  Church  as  teacher — Ecdesia 
Bocens — is  the  condensed  and  realized  expression  of  that 
utterance  of  God  through  human  life  which  is  struggling 
for  expression  wherever  God  through  humanity  is  seeking 


THE   TEACHABLEXESS   OF  RELIGION.  211 

man.  Tlie  diffiised  liglit  here  is  gatliered  and  ponred 
tliroiigli  the  lens.  For  the  Chureli  to  hold  and  impart 
the  truth  of  God  is  something  far  more  than  for  her  to  be 
the  repository  of  certain  statements  which  she  takes  on 
one  side  from  the  mouth  of  the  Eternal  Certainty,  and 
utters  as  throngh  a  trumpet  on  the  other  side  into  the 
ears  of  human  ignorance.  The  process  is  vital,  not  me- 
chanical. She  is  one  both  with  God  and  man,  made  of 
human  stuff,  holding  her  human  Bible,  sharing  the  for- 
tunes of  the  world  she  hves  in,  presenting  power  and  love 
through  her  simple  sacraments,  which  in  their  fixity  of 
form  are  yet  so  simple  that  they  are  different  to  every 
experience  which  receives  them.  The  Church  fulfils  the 
best  idea  of  teaching,  and  anticipates  and  prophesies  the 
time  when  all  humanitj^  shall  be  the  utterance  of  God  to 
all  humanity,  when  not  in  single  rays  of  light  shot  here 
and  there  to  lighten  special  ignorance,  but  in  a  univer- 
sally diffusive  radiance,  each  j)article  reflecting  light  on 
every  other,  all  shall  know  God,  from  the  least  even  to 
the  greatest. 

Let  us  sum  up,  then,  what  we  have  said  about  the  gen- 
eral method  of  the  teaching  of  religion.  It  comes  directly 
from  the  soul  of  God  laid  immediately  upon  and  pressing 
itself  into  the  soul  of  every  one  of  His  children.  It  is  the 
gift  of  the  total  nature  of  God  to  the  total  nature  of  man. 
Therefore  it  can  utter  itself  only  through  the  total  human 
life,  which  is  personal  life.  And  it  is  by  the  primary  per- 
sonal relationship,  and  by  the  great  universal  personality 
of  man,  and  by  the  Son  of  God  who  is  also  the  son  of  man, 
and  by  the  Church  which  is  the  anticipated  fulfilment  of 
humanity,  by  these  as  media  that  the  Eternal  Father,  who 
at  the  same  time  is  always  giving  Himself  most  of  all 
immediately,  bestows  Himself  on  man. 

It  would  seem  as  if  in  this  truth  of  the  largeness  of  the 


212  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDRESSES. 

method  of  the  teaching  of  religion  lay  the  explanation  of 
a  good  many  things  which  sometimes  puzzle  us.  Let  us 
see  what  a  few  of  them  are. 

First,  there  is  the  way  in  which  people  aequii*e  their 
heliefs  and  lose  them.  A  man  declares  himself  a  believer 
in  the  Christian  doctrine.  He  claims  his  place  in  the 
communion  of  the  Christian  Church.  I  am  rejoiced  and 
grateful ;  but  I  am  bewildered  and  almost  dismayed  when 
I  recognize  how  absolutely  little  he  knows  about  the  evi- 
dence on  which  the  Christian  doctrine  rests,  and  which 
constitutes  for  me  the  ground  and  justification  for  my 
holding  it.  Perhaps  he  gives  me  what  he  calls  his  reasons 
for  believing,  and  I  know  that  not  one  of  them,  nor  all 
together,  would  hold  a  cobweb's  weight,  far  less  woidd 
hold  a  structure  such  as  he  thinks  that  he  has  built  upon 
them.  Wliat  then  ?  I  know  that  these  are  not  his  rea- 
sons for  believing,  though  he  honestly  tliinks  they  are. 
Through  other  doors  the  truth  has  entered  in.  Through 
spiritual  and  moral,  almost  through  physical  necessities 
of  his  nature,  Clnist  has  claimed  him.  There  is  confusion 
enough  about  it  all,  but  still  the  fact  is  certain  that  the 
man,  the  total  man,  believes,  though  he  cannot  begin  to 
tell  the  reason  why  any  more  than  the  flower  can  account 
for  its  color. 

The  same  applies  to  the  loss  of  belief  as  well  as  to  the 
gaining  of  it.  Your  friend  ceases  to  hold  what  you  and 
he  have  held  together.  You  ask  for  an  explanation  of 
the  change,  and  he  can  give  you  none.  No  process  of  de- 
structive reason  has  dislodged  his  old  conviction.  But 
that  does  not  prove  that  he  has  been  whimsical  or  wilful. 
Since  his  belief  was  the  possession  of  all  his  nature  and 
not  merely  of  his  reasoning  mind,  it  might  be  attacked 
and  overthrown  at  any  one  of  many  points.  That  was 
the  danger  of  it  which  lay  in  its  essential  quality,  as  the 
dangers  of  all  things  do.     Therefore  a  new  view  of  some 


THE   TEACRABLEXESS   OF  EELIGIOX.  213 

of  his  truth's  applications,  a  new  sight  of  it  as  it  took 
form  in  another's  life,  some  question  about  its  effect,  if  it 
were  universal  or  perpetual,  some  conflict  even  between 
it  and  his  taste  or  sense  of  humor,  might  shake  it  and 
dislodge  it  from  its  pedestal.  Since  it  belonged  to  the 
whole  man,  wherever  the  man  could  be  invaded  the  belief 
might  be  attacked. 

In  the  days  when  Dr.  Colenso  was  the  object  of  denun- 
ciation for  a  large  portion  of  the  Anglican  world,  some- 
body wrote  a  nonsense- verse  which  seemed  to  many  people 
to  perfectty  demonstrate  the  feebleness  and  vacillation  of 
his  change  of  thought.     It  ran  thus : 

"  A  bishop  there  was  in  Natal 
Who  had  a  Zulu  for  a  '  pal ' ; 
Said  the  savage,  '  Look  here, 
Ain't  the  Pentateuch  queer 
Which  converted  my  lord  of  Natal?  '  " 

If  a  part  of  the  bishojD's  reason  for  believing  the 
Pentateuch  had  been  his  thought  of  how  its  revelation 
formed  and  commended  itself  to  the  simple  human  intelli- 
gence, then  he  might  well  have  been  set  to  self-examina- 
tion by  the  barbarian's  question.  Not  by  being  queer, 
but  by  being  natural,  does  religion  justify  itself.  And  so 
by  that  door,  as  well  as  by  any  other,  the  skepticism  might 
come  in. 

We  do  not  know  how  to  deal  with  doubt  unless  we 
know  how  to  consider  it  a  condition  of  the  total  life.  It 
is  of  course  of  various  kinds  and  different  tendencies. 
Sometimes  it  is  a  dislodgment  which  means  advance,  like 
the  loss  of  equilibrium  in  walking,  which  is  the  necessary 
preliminary  to  each  forward  step.  Sometimes  it  is  simply 
loss  without  advance  or  gain,  like  the  dissolving  of  ele- 
ments in  decay  and  death.  But  in  either  case  doulit  is 
very  rarely,  perhaps  never,  a  condition  of  the  intellect 


214  ESSAYS  AND  ADDBESSES. 

alone.  The  whole  man  doubts,  just  as  the  whole  man 
formerly  Ijelieved.  The  very  body,  the  nerves  and  blood, 
partake  in  the  disorder  and  dislodgment.  The  affections 
are  bewildered  and  distressed.  The  mind  lacks  evidence, 
and  each  part  of  the  nature  reproaches  the  rest  with,  while 
it  contributes  to,  their  unbelief.  When  we  know  this  then 
we  see  how  helpless  must  be  the  panaceas  for  doubt  which 
the  doctors  of  the  soul  compound  and  the  Church  book- 
stores sell.  Every  true  man's  doubt  is  his  own,  different 
from  any  other  man's,  and  there  can  be  no  treatment  of 
it  which  does  not  take  the  man  in  his  entirety  into  a 
higher  and  a  healthier  region  where  the  whole  being  of 
God  can  meet  and  act  upon  the  whole  being  of  His  child. 
Surely  this  was  what  Jesus  meant  when  He  spoke  again 
and  again  of  men  coming  through  Him  to  the  Father. 
In  that  embrace  of  the  life  by  God  the  evil  doubt  is  dis- 
sipated and  the  good  and  healthy  doubt  is  ripened  to  the 
higher  faith. 

And  if  what  I  have  said  about  the  teaching  of  rehgion 
is  true,  then  we  may  also  understand  another  thing,  which 
the  teachers  of  religion  are  always  discovering,  and  which 
often  perplexes  and  puzzles  them.  No  teacher  is  the  only 
teacher  of  any  soul.  Whenever  God  leads  a  soul  to  teach 
another  soul,  He  still  keeps  that  other  soul  in  His  own 
teaching  all  the  time.  He  ministers  to  it  directly,  and 
also  He  sets  all  His  other  teachers  at  work  upon  it,  nature 
and  history  and  society  and  literature  and  art,  sorrow 
and  joy,  pleasm-e  and  pain,  all  pour  in  upon  it  their  in- 
struction. The  consequence  is  that  when  the  appointed 
instructor  comes,  when  the  missionarj^  lands  on  the  beach 
of  the  life  to  which  he  has  been  sent,  he  finds  that  God 
and  God's  truth  is  already  there  before  him.  Wlien  Paul 
climbs  Mars'  Hill  he  catches  the  echoes  of  "  certain  poets," 
who  alreadj^  have  been  singing  of  the  Fatherhood  of  God. 
There  is  no  teachership  so  absolute  that  it  is  not  met  by 


THE   TEACHABLENESS   OF  RELIGION.  215 

this  discoveiy.  Wise  and  happy  is  the  teacher  who  is 
able  to  rejoice  iu  all  that  God  has  done  and  is  doing  for 
His  own  cliild  dii'ectly  and  by  other  means,  and  makes 
what  he  has  to  teach  blend  freely  with  what  the  soul  al- 
ready knows. 

And  yet  again  the  vitality  of  the  teaching  of  reUgion 
involves  one  other  necessary  consequence.  It  is  inevitable 
that  the  truth  which  is  taught,  entering  into  living  union 
with  the  learner's  nature,  should  become  in  him  something 
different  from  what  it  was  in  the  teacher's  mind  and  life 
who  gave  it.  Until  we  recognize  this  necessity  we  are 
perpetually  disaj)pointed  and  bewildered.  When  we  have 
once  fully  accepted  it,  we  rejoice  to  find  that  which  we 
have  known  and  taught  in  our  own  shape  opening  into 
new  luxuriance  of  form  and  color  in  the  natm*e  of  him  to 
whom  we  have  imparted  it.  Truth  taught  is  not  like  a 
nail  driven  into  a  board,  which  remains  forever  the  same 
nail  that  it  was  when  it  lay  in  the  nail-box.  It  is  the  tree 
planted  in  the  soil  which  mingles  its  natui-e  with  the 
ground ;  or,  rather,  it  is  fii^e  communicated  to  fuel  which 
burns  with  the  color  of  the  new  wood  which  has  been 
kindled ;  or,  rather,  to  come  back  to  oui*  first  metaphor,  it 
is  Hke  friend  introduced  to  friend,  so  that  the  two  know 
each  other  in  theii*  own  way,  and  not  according  to  the 
method  of  the  friend  who  introduced  them  to  each  other. 

Evidently  any  statement  of  belief  in  which  two  men  or 
more  than  two  unite  must  be  of  suificient  simplicity  and 
breadth  to  freely  hold  within  itself  these  vital  differences. 
This  is  the  beauty  and  value  of  our  Church's  Creed.  We 
all  believe  it,  and  no  two  thinking  men  hold  it  alike.  It 
is  as  various  as  theii*  various  personalities  witli  which  it 
has  entered  into  living  union. 

The  Church  has  no  unwritten  law,  no  interpretation  of 
her  creed  to  which  her  children  must  conform.  That  is 
a  truth  concerning  her  on  which  we  always  must  insist. 


216  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDIIESSES. 

She  has  her  creed,  in  which  all  her  children  alike  believe 
and  all  believe  differeutty.  Thus  she  keej)S  the  union  of 
identity  and  variety,  which  all  living-  things  must  have. 
Thus  she  bids  each  believer  be  a  sharer  in  the  belief  of 
all,  while  at  the  same  time  he  holds  his  own  personal  con- 
viction clear.  Dogmatism  loses  the  liberty  and  life  of 
personal  conviction,  skepticism  loses  the  largeness  of  the 
universal  faith.  The  Chui^ch,  if  she  holds  her  creed  as  a 
creed  ought  to  be  held,  is  neither  dogmatic  nor  skeptical, 
but  keeps  both  the  special  and  the  universal,  and  makes 
them  minister  to  each  other.  This  is  wln^  she  is  the 
home  of  generous  belief.  This  is  why,  if  one  may  recog- 
nize how,  as  is  the  case  with  most  epigrams  of  compari- 
son, not  merely  the  lanreate's  famous  words  but  also  their 
reverse  is  true : 

"There  lives  more  faith  in  honest  creeds, 
Believe  me,  than  iu  half  the  doubt." 

All  tolerance  has  its  justification  and  its  security  within 
the  compass  of  these  two  truths,  the  first,  that  God  is  the 
direct  Teacher  of  His  children,  and  the  second,  that  belief 
is  a  condition  of  the  total  man.  He  who  holds  both  of 
them  cannot  be  intolerant.  He  is  kept  always  aware  that 
truth  may  enter  through  either  of  several  doors,  but  hav- 
ing once  entered  is  truly  the  possessor  of  the  house,  and 
that  every  nature  must  hold  truth  in  its  own  way,  but  that 
its  hold  on  truth  is  not  less  but  more  strong  because  it  is 
its  own  and  different  from  any  other  nature's. 

It  is  on  these  two  truths  as  giving  the  color  and  mean- 
ing to  all  teaching  of  religion  that  I  have  wished  to  insist. 
If  I  were  writing  a  homiletical  lectm*e,  there  are  certain 
inferences  of  a  practical  sort  regarding  the  minister's 
work  on  which  it  would  be  easy  to  dwell  at  length.  But 
I  must  not  touch  them  now.  Let  me  go  back  where  I 
began.     It  is  possible  to  teach  religion — nay,  it  is  neces- 


THE   TEACHABLENESS   OF  RELIGION.  217 

saiy.  The  Boston  boy  left  to  pick  up  his  religion  where 
he  will,  and  the  saint  by  the  Gauges  scorching  out  his  re- 
ligion in  the  furious  sun,  are  both  being  taught  by  their 
surroundings,  by  their  traditions,  whether  they  will  or 
not.  The  struggle  must  be  not  to  refrain  from  teaching, 
but  to  keep  teaching  large  and  vital,  to  think  of  it  always 
not  as  putting  facts  into  a  box,  but  as  putting  truth  into 
a  nature.  And  the  teacher  of  religion  can  preserve  not 
merely  his  joy  in  his  work  but  also  his  fitness  for  it  only 
as  he  always  counts  himself  an  under-teacher  in  the  school 
of  Christ,  and  rejoices  that  beyond  and  around  what  he 
can  do  with  his  Sunday-schools  and  catechisms  all  the 
children  of  Jerusalem  ai"e  being  taught  of  God. 


THE   HEALTHY   CONDITIONS   OF  A   CHANGE 
OF   FAITH. 

Let  us  try  to  trace  the  healthy  way  of  passing  from  one 
aspect  of  religious  truth  to  another.  I  prefer  to  speak  of 
that  which  a  man  leaves  and  that  to  wliicli  a  man  conies 
as  one  and  another  aspect  of  truth,  because,  while  it  is 
not  good  to  make  the  differences  of  opinions  and  convic- 
tions seem  less  than  they  really  are,  it  is  good,  it  is  even 
essential  to  such  an  inquiry  as  we  are  undertaking,  to 
keep  in  sight  always  the  inmost  central  truth  after  which 
all  earnest  thinkers  are  striving,  which  they  are  all  ready 
to  own  that  none  of  them  sees  completely,  and  the  con- 
fessedly imperfect  sight  of  which  by  all  means  must  fur- 
nish the  first  ground  both  for  the  toleration  and  sympathy 
for  one  another  among  men  who  differ,  and  also  for  pres- 
ervation of  the  sense  of  continuity  in  the  life  of  any  man 
whose  thoughts  have  undergone  great  change. 

It  seems  as  if  the  time  had  come  when  such  a  study  as 
I  propose  were  necessar}'.  For  an  advance  from  one  set 
of  convictions  to  another  is  the  experience  of  our  time  in 
almost  all  its  active  minds.  Who  of  us  holds  the  same 
opinions  to-day  that  he  held  twenty  or  ten  years  ago? 
And  who  of  us  is  prepared  to  say  that  his  opinions  are 
not  destined  to  change  in  the  future  quite  as  much  as  they 
have  changed  in  the  past  ?  These  are  questions  which  the 
members  of  any  clerical  meeting  might  no  doubt  have 

218 


HEALTHY  CONDITIONS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH.  219 

asked  of  one  anotlier  in  any  age  of  history.  We  doubt- 
less form  too  low  an  estimate  of  the  amount  of  intellectual 
vitality  and  movement  which  has  existed  even  in  the  most 
stagnant  times.  But  in  our  day  change  of  opinion  is  the 
rule,  persistency  of  opinion  is  the  exception.  To-day, 
therefore,  it  is  especially  needful  that  we  should  under- 
stand, if  we  can,  what  is  the  healthy  way  of  passing  from 
one  aspect  of  truth  into  another. 

It  is  not  the  most  interesting  soi-t  of  inquu-y.  It  has 
too  much  of  seK-consciousness  about  it.  It  may  be  dan- 
gerous to  the  best  growth  to  try  to  find  out  how  that 
grov/th  takes  place.  But  if  we  can  examine  the  roots 
without  pulling  up  the  plants,  we  may  be  able  to  help 
them  more  intelligently  and  to  protect  them  as  they  grow. 

In  general,  then,  is  not  the  great  principle  of  the  healthy 
development  of  opinion  this,  that  it  is  always  good  to  go 
away  from  old  positions,  not  because  they  have  been  over- 
thrown and  made  untenable,  but  because  something  more 
attractive  and  valuable  is  discerned  beyond?  The  jour- 
ney is  from  truth  to  greater  truth. 

I  do  not  think  we  realize  at  once  how  universal  such  a 
princii3le  may  be.  It  seems  to  us  at  fii'st  as  if  it  were  one 
method  of  movement,  but  not  the  only  one.  You  may 
advance  from  the  imperfect  to  the  more  perfect  truth,  still 
letting  the  imperfect  truth  out  of  which  you  go  stand, 
still  giving  it  respect  and  gratitude.  But  if,  so  it  is  said, 
that  which  you  leave  is  not  merely  imperfect  truth  but 
positive  error,  then  it  must  come  down  even  regardless  of 
whether  any  other  shelter  is  offering  itself  beyond — then 
you  must  leave  your  disproved  falsehood  even  though 
you  see  no  truth  to  flee  to,  and  can  only  stand  waiting  in 
the  cold.  And  that  is  true ;  but  also  it  is  true  that  there 
is  no  falsehood  which  man  has  once  earnestly  believed 
which  has  not  in  it  truth  enough  to  furnish  a  point  of 
departure,  and  that  there  is  no  direction  in  which  a  man 


220  ESUAYfS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

can  earnestly  look  for  truth  in  wliicli  he  may  not  see  some 
partial  truth  which  is  large  enough  at  least  to  furnish 
him  with  temporary  lodgment  on  his  way  toward  the  en- 
tire truth  which  is  still  out  of  his  sight.  Therefore  I  be- 
lieve that  we  may  claim  that  our  principle  is  practically 
universal :  that  the  healthy  law  of  all  change  of  opinion  is 
not  the  abandonment  of  overthrown  positions,  but  the 
pm-suit  of  something  still  more  attractive  and  important 
that  is  discerned  beyond. 

If  it  is  a  true  principle,  it  certainly  is  an  important  one, 
because  it  decides  what  shall  be  the  meaning  and  spiiit  of 
the  restless  changes  of  opinion  in  the  midst  of  which  we 
live.  Christian  thought  has  altered  its  positions  wonder- 
fully in  the  last  quarter  of  a  century.  What  shall  we 
think  about  it  all?  Is  Christian  thought  on  the  retreat 
or  the  advance?  Is  the  army  reluctantly  abandoning 
fortresses  which  it  would  like  to  hold,  but  which  are  no 
longer  tenable,  or  is  it  moving  forward  and  occupying 
wider  fields  and  only  deserting  its  own  strongholds  by 
the  welcome  necessity  of  its  advance  ?  According  to  our 
answers  to  these  questions  will  be  the  spirit  of  despon- 
dency or  of  hope  with  which  we  live  in  these  times  of 
changing  doctrine.  I  beheve  that  our  principle,  applied 
to  these  times,  may  give  us  the  right  to  live  in  great  en- 
coiu'agement  and  hopefulness. 

We  can  understand  oui'selves  best  if  we  take  some 
special  truth  with  regard  to  which  the  opinions  of  many 
people  have  undergone  and  are  undergoing  change,  and 
speak  of  that,  remembering  always  that  we  are  speaking 
of  it  as  a  specimen  of  many  truths  to  which  the  same 
principle  would  equally  apply. 

Let  us  take,  then,  the  truth  of  the  punishment  of  the 
wicked  in  the  future  life.  It  is  a  truth.  The  changes  of 
opinions  with  regard  to  the  nature  and  duration  of  future 
punishment  have  mostly  gone  on  within  the  recognition 


HEALTHY  CONDITIONS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH.   221 

that  sin  bears  its  fruit  beyond  the  grave  as  well  as  here. 
Within  the  recognition  of  that  fact,  however,  we  all  know 
how  many  men  have  come  to  believe,  first,  in  the  essential- 
ness  of  punishment  as  distinct  from  the  arbitrariness  of 
punishment — that  is,  that  the  misery  which  follows  and 
accompanies  sin  is  bound  up  in  the  very  nature  of  the  sin 
itself ;  and  second,  in  the  possible  expiration  of  punish- 
ment by  the  possible  restoral  of  the  sinner  to  goodness. 
I  think  that  this  order  of  ideas  must  be  observed.  All 
the  doubt  about  the  necessary  endlessness  of  futui^e  pun- 
ishment, which  is  intelligent  and  earnest,  is  preceded  by 
a  change  of  belief,  more  or  less  clearly  recognized,  about 
the  nature  of  punishment  and  the  relation  which  it  holds 
to  sin. 

We  may  ask,  then,  on  what  grounds  it  is  conceivable 
that  various  disbelievers  in  the  doctrine  of  necessary  ever- 
lasting siiffering,  settled  for  those  who  die  in  sin  at  the 
moment  of  their  death,  have  reached  their  disbelief.  Each 
of  the  several  grounds  on  which  it  is  conceivable  that  such 
a  belief  might  be  reached  will  be  recognized  as  the  ground 
on  which  some  of  the  disbelievers  in  the  doctrine  have 
actually  reached  it.  And  I  hope  the  difference  between 
the  unhealthy  and  the  healthy  ways  of  reaching  it  will 
appear. 

1.  The  fii'st  ground,  and  the  lowest,  is  the  ground  of 
fear.  A  man  disbelieves  that  which  he  dreads.  The  wish 
is  father  to  the  thought.  The  wicked  man  says,  "  If  this 
doctrine  be  true,  then  my  prospects  are  horrible ;  "  and  so 
he  says,  "  I  will  not  believe  that  it  is  true."  The  mixture 
of  the  will  with  the  judgment  is  such  a  familiar  sight. 
We  are  so  used  to  seeing  how  even  in  matters  which  are 
far  more  vividly  forced  upon  them  than  are  the  terrors  of 
an  unseen  world,  men  liave  a  certain  large  power  to  choose 
what  evidence  their  minds  shall  receive  and  what  they 
shall  neglect,  that  we  should  know  beforehand  that  there 


222  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

would  be  a  class  of  disbelievers  sncli  as  these  in  any  such 
doctrine  as  that  of  necessary  everlasting  future  punish- 
ment. No  doubt  this  grossest  of  all  motives  has  been 
often  basely  attributed  where  it  did  not  exist.  No  doubt 
it  has  sometimes  existed  where  the  disbehever  honestly 
thought  that  he  disbelieved  on  liigher  grounds.  But  no 
doubt  it  always  has  had,  and  has  now,  and  always  will 
have,  its  power.  It  is  of  coiu'se  the  lowest  and  most  cow- 
ardly and  least  reasonable  ground  for  the  abandonment 
of  any  faith.  It  is  so  low  and  cowardly  that  it  always 
covers  itself  with  other  pretexts.  It  is  the  base  desertion 
of  the  fort  by  soldiers  who  are  afraid  to  hold  it,  who  are 
unwilling  to  meet  the  dangers  and  duties  which  its  con- 
tinued occupation  will  involve. 

2.  And  next  to  fear  comes  taste.  Many  men  who  are 
not  timid  are  fastidious.  Their  freedom  from  timidity 
may  be  owing  partly  to  a  lack  of  imagination,  by  which 
they  fail  to  realize  that  which  is  far  away.  But  what  is 
close  at  hand  they  feel,  and  in  the  doctrine  which  we  have 
taken  for  an  illustration  it  is  the  unwelcome  seriousness 
which  it  makes  in  life,  the  discord  between  it  and  what 
they  think  is  the  general  tone  of  the  Christian  faith,  the 
harsh  eagerness  with  which  it  inspires  the  characters  of 
those  who  earnestly  believe  it — it  is  these  things  that 
make  the  skeptic  from  taste  disown  the  doctrine  of  ever- 
lasting punishment.  I  do  not  mean  to  deny  some  true 
significance  to  his  skepticism.  If  the  recognized  beauty 
of  a  doctrine  brings,  as  we  constantly  claim,  some  assur- 
ance of  its  truth,  the  recognized  ugliness  of  a  doctrine 
may  weU  give  some  presumption  of  its  falsity.  Only  we 
need  to  have  some  warrant  of  the  spiritual  perception  of 
the  man  who  judges  before  we  can  know  how  much  his 
spiritual  taste  is  worth,  and  at  its  best  the  power  of  taste 
to  deal  with  the  evidence  of  truth  has  very  narrow  limits. 

3,  Higher  than  the  disbelief  of  fear  or  the  disbelief  of 


HEALTHY  CONDITIONS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH.  223 

taste,  much  higher,  is  the  disbehef  of  reason.  This  comes 
when  the  mind  is  jiersnaded  that  there  is  proof  that  the 
doctrine  which  it  has  been  hokling  is  untrue,  or,  what 
comes  to  the  same  thing",  that  there  is  no  proof  that  it  is 
true.  In  the  ease  of  the  special  doctrine  of  which  we  are 
speaking,  the  argument  of  reason  involves  the  whole  con- 
side]"ation  of  the  Scriptnre  on  the  subject,  first  of  the 
authority  of  Scripture,  and  then  of  what  it  says  on  this 
especial  point.  The  disbelief  of  reason  is  peremptory  and 
absolute.  The  soul  cannot  hold  what  the  reason  declares 
to  be  untrue.  Whether  any  other  refuge,  any  snbstitiite 
for  what  it  leaves,  is  offered  it  or  not,  the  faith  must  leave 
the  dogma  which  has  no  support  in  reason.  Yet,  none 
the  less,  it  is  not  the  highest  or  best  door  by  which  to  go 
out  of  a  belief. 

4.  I  mention  next  a  curious  form  of  disbelief  which  we 
can  call  nothing  else  than  the  disbelief  of  good  nature  or 
of  complaisance.  A  man  has  no  objection  to  a  creed  him- 
self. Neither  his  reason  nor  his  taste  rejects  it.  If  he 
stood  alone  in  the  world  he  would  hold  it  fi-eely.  But 
other  men  are  trovibled  about  it.  Some  things  about  it 
they  cannot  make  to  seem  true.  Tlie  spirit  of  the  time  is 
out  of  sympathy  with  it.  To  a  certain  class  of  minds, 
amiable  and  very  anxious  that  other  men  should  be  be- 
lievers, this  state  of  things  presents  a  strong  temptation. 
To  make  believing  easy,  to  remove  as  many  as  possible  of 
the  hard  points  of  the  faith,  seems  almost  a  duty.  And 
what  the  man  has  told  his  friend  that  it  is  of  no  conse- 
quence whether  he  believes  or  not,  it  is  very  likely  that 
he  will  by  and  by  disbelieve  himself. 

"  On  a  recent  Sunday  evening,"  said  the  newspaper,  "  a 
stranger,  tired  and  dusty,  leaned  against  a  lamp-post  at 
Rochester  while  he  inquired  the  distance  to  Farmington. 
'  Eight  miles,'  said  a  boy.  '  Are  you  sure  it  is  as  far  as 
that?'     The  boy,  with  his  Ing  heart  overflowing  with  the 


224  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDEESSES. 

milk  of  Imman  kindness,  replied,  '  "Well,  seeing  yon  are 
pretty  tired,  I  will  call  it  seven  miles.' "  Somewliat  like 
that  are  the  charitable  concessions  in  doctrine  with  which 
we  are  familiar.  If  he  met  many  such  dusty  travelers  and 
was  as  kind  to  all  of  them,  the  Rochester  boy  mnst  have 
come  at  last  to  think  himseK  that  Farmington  was  only 
seven  miles  away. 

5.  There  is  another  way  of  leaving  a  conviction,  which 
is  by  simple  restlessness,  and  the  love  of  change  for 
change's  sake.  I  think  there  never  was  a  movement  for- 
ward of  the  whole  line  of  thought  in  which  this  spirit  had 
not  its  share  of  power.  Men  whose  nature  it  is  to  love 
the  old  for  its  oldness  probably  have  no  idea  how  disagree- 
able to  another  kind  of  men,  just  because  of  its  oldness, 
is  the  venerable  thing  which  they  admire  and  love.  It  is 
not  a  high  spirit,  this  discontented  restlessness  of  faith. 
If  it  were  made  universal  it  would  turn  the  army  of  belief 
into  a  mob.  It  always  has  a  certain  air  of  bravado,  and 
bravado  is  what  above  all  things  the  man  who  is  chang- 
ing his  belief  wants  to  avoid.  No  man  wants  to  leave  a 
faith  which  has  been  a  home  for  his  soul,  but  which  it  has 
become  impossible  for  him  to  live  in  any  longer,  without 
something  of  tenderness  and  regret.  To  spring  out  of 
the  door  with  a  wild  shout,  only  delighted  to  be  free,  de- 
clares a  superficial  soul.  And  yet  I  am  sure,  in  spite  of 
this,  that  in  some  low  degree  the  mere  restlessness  of  faith 
which  belongs  to  lighter  men  has  its  true  function.  It 
keeps  the  seLf-satisfied  faith  of  the  heavier  men  from  fall- 
ing quite  to  sleep,  and  it  helps  to  maintain  the  life  and 
impulse  of  a  movement  when  it  flags. 

But  now  all  these  five  ways  of  departing  from  a  posi- 
tion we  have  held  have  this  one  thing  in  common :  they 
are  all  retreats.  They  all  confess  defeat.  They  all  leave 
the  old  fortress  because  it  is  unpleasing  or  unsafe.     A 


HEALTHY  CONDITIONS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH.  225 

clear  line  runs  between  all  of  tliem  and  the  other  motive, 
whicli  consists  in  the  invitation  which  is  held  out  by  the 
prospect  of  a  fuller  truth.  Suppose  that  our  believer  in 
the  assertion  of  God's  justice  by  the  everlasting  torment 
of  the  wicked  catches  sight  of  a  higher  justice  which  shall 
assert  itself  in  the  very  nature  of  things,  in  the  essential 
linking  of  suffering  to  sin.  When  suffering,  instead  of 
being  the  vengeance  of  an  angry  God,  becomes  the  out- 
ward and  visible  sign  of  an  inward  and  spiritual  disgrace, 
what  then  ?  Under  the  power  of  this  conviction,  the  man 
inevitably  disbelieves  in  the  necessary  unendingness  of 
all  the  punishments  of  the  other  life.  The  other  life,  as 
w'e  feebly  call  it,  and  this  life  become  not  two,  but  one. 
The  same  laws  of  pim^ishment  apply  to  both.  No  longer 
does  he  think  of  mercy  and  justice  as  rival  claimants  of 
the  soul.  The  soul  is  God's  always  and  forever,  and  God's 
mercy  and  God's  justice,  which  are  not  separable  from 
each  other,  because  both  are  God  and  God  is  always  one, 
are  both  of  them  forever  present  with  the  soul.  What 
has  become,  then,  of  the  old  belief  ?  The  man  has  left  it, 
but  without  bitterness,  without  reaction,  simply  and  nat- 
urally, and  almost  unconsciously,  as  the  child  passes  into 
manhood. 

Again  let  mc  remind  you  that  I  use  the  special  instance 
only  as  an  illustration.  I  am  anxious  that  the  discussion 
should  not  be  di"awn  away  to  the  particular  instance,  on 
which  we  might  very  likely  disagree.  Whether  we  agree 
or  disagree  about  it,  it  makes  the  principle  clear. ^  The 
principle  once  made  clear  may  be  applied  to  any  other 
doctrine  in  which  advance  of  thought  is  possible,  as  to  the 
Ciuestion  of  the  inspiration  of  the  Bible,  of  the  vicarious 
suffering  of  Christ,  or  of  the  authority  of  the  Christian 
priesthood,  or  to  any  other  question.  In  every  case  the 
principle  is  that  he  leaves  a  belief  unfortunately  who  leaves 


226  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

it  solely  from  a  discovery  of  its  imperfections  or  untruth. 
He  leaves  a  belief  healthily  and  hopefidly  who  goes  for- 
ward from  it  to  a  more  complete  belief  beyond. 

This  principle,  it  ought  to  be  said,  does  not  exclude  tbe 
lower,  lesser  motives  of  departure  from  an  opinion  which 
one  has  held.  It  simply  surrounds  them  with  its  higher 
spirit.  The  garrison  which  leaves  its  fortress  to  advance 
against  the  enemy  may  still,  as  it  goes  out,  rejoice  that  it 
is  to  be  shut  up  no  longer  within  walls  which  it  has  found 
to  be  uncomfortable  and  unsafe.  But  the  real  reason  of 
its  advance  is  in  its  hopes  and  not  its  fears.  It  goes  be- 
cause the  new  land  tempts  it,  not  because  the  old  repels 
it.     So  it  goes  hopefully  and  with  enthusiasm. 

Of  course  our  whole  discussion  takes  for  granted  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  possible  as  a  progress  in  the  know- 
ledge of  truth.  Of  that  it  is  hard  to  see  how  any  thought- 
ful man  can  doubt.  It  must  be  possible  for  man  to  know 
more  of  God,  l)ecause  the  knowledge  of  God  by  man  in- 
volves two  elements,  the  known  and  the  knower,  God  and 
man ;  and  however  perfectly  God  may  have  revealed  Him- 
self, man  is  but  half  developed  and  has  only  half  posses- 
sion of  his  knowing  powers.  The  faith  has  been  "  once 
delivered  to  the  saints,"  as  Canaan  was  given  to  the  Isra- 
elites. To  "  go  in  and  jjossess  the  land  "  is  still  the  duty 
of  the  Christian  Israel.  Who  shall  say  how  far  it  has 
been  occupied  in  all  these  Christian  centiu-ies?  We  may 
be  yet  only  at  Jericho  and  Ai.  Some  most  adventurous 
and  earnest  tribes  may  have  pushed  on  to  Betliel.  Some 
very  determined  and  aspiring  soids  may  have  climbed  to 
the  mountain-tops  and  even  caught  sight  of  the  flashing 
sea  which  bounds  the  Promised  Land  upon  the  western 
side.  However  we  may  estimate  the  j^rogress  of  the  past, 
there  still  remains  "very  much  land  to  be  possessed." 
Surely  the  strongest  way  to  contend  for  the  faith  once 
delivered  to  the  saints  is  to  go  forward  reverently  till  the 


HEALTHY  COXDITIOXS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH.  227 

saints  shall  perfectly  possess  the  land  and  know  aU  that 
it  is  possible  for  them  to  know  of  God  and  of  His  Book 
and  of  His  ways. 

With  regard  to  aU  advances  in  theology,  whether  by 
the  race  at  large  or  by  the  single  tliinker,  there  are  one 
or  two  observations  which  may  be  made,  and  which,  it 
seems  to  me,  ought  constantly  to  be  kept  in  mind  in 
times  like  these,  wlien  the  world  of  theological  thought  is 
so  full  of  free  activity.  For  the  first  time  in  many  cen- 
turies the  hand  of  external  restraint  is  absolutely  taken 
off  from  theological  thinking.  Neither  painful  penal- 
ties nor  social  disesteem — hardly,  except  in  the  extrem- 
est  cases,  even  ecclesiastical  reproof — will  attach  them- 
selves to  free  speculation  in  theology.  To  many  people 
this  state  of  things  seems  full  of  danger.  To  many  others 
it  seems  full  of  hope.  But  those  who  hope  the  most  from 
it  must  be  supremely  anxious  that  those  who  feel  the 
sj)ii'it  of  the  age  should  feel  it  worthily,  and  move  from 
conviction  to  con\iction,  not  lightly  and  frivolously,  but 
seriously  and  calmly,  always  valuing  each  special  move- 
ment only  as  a  stage  iu  the  long,  never-forgotten  search 
of  the  soul  after  the  perfect  truth  and  Grod. 

With  this  anxiety  upon  his  mind,  one  must  feel  and 
want  to  say  that  every  change  of  opinion  ought  to  strive 
after  general  conceptions  and  not  be  content  with  merely 
adding  to  or  refining  some  special  point  in  the  details  of 
faith.  Of  course  each  change  of  opinion  must,  by  the 
natiu-e  of  the  case,  deal  with  details.  But  every  point  to 
which  any  opinion  relates  is  part  of  the  large  system  of 
truth,  and  the  change  of  attitude  with  reference  to  any 
point  ought  to  bring  us  new  hght  upon  the  whole  great 
system  and  the  first  principles  which  are  its  source  and 
strength.  We  ought  to  be  dissatisfied  mtli  any  change 
of  opinion  which  does  not  go  as  far  as  this.  Mere  changes 
of  \dews  are  insignificant  and  petty.     It  is  a  change  of 


228  ESSAYS  A^^D   ADDRESSES. 

vieiv  that  is  important.  Many  people  find  fault  with 
changes  of  ojjinion  because  they  go  too  far.  Is  it  not 
quite  as  often  the  trouble  with  them  that  they  do  not  go 
far  enough  ?  They  stop  in  the  criticism  or  denial  of  some 
special  doctrine.  They  do  not  go  on  to  some  height  where 
they  can  see  more  of  God,  where  they  can  see  God  anew. 
To  take  again  the  same  illustration  which  we  have  been 
using,  the  thinker  who  has  come  to  believe  that  no  man 
shall  necessarily  suffer  everlasting  punishment  has  altered 
one  view  of  one  doctrine.  But  he  who  has  come  to  the 
sight  of  the  essentialness  of  all  God's  working,  so  that 
thereafter,  like  a  new  sunlight,  it  saturates  all  his  thoughts, 
has  come  to  a  new  and  fuller  faith.  And  it  is  only  in 
seeking  and  reaching  a  new  and  fuller  faith  that  the  alter- 
ation of  one  view  of  one  doctrine  is  healthily  made. 

The  second  statement  is  that  every  advancing  theology 
must  be  always  cordially  ready  to  be  tested  by  the  first 
simple  standards  of  devoutness  and  morality. 

Men's  first  demand  of  a  religion  is  that  it  should  be  re- 
ligious. Any  theological  movement  that  seems  to  dimin- 
ish instead  of  increasing  men's  devoutness  naturally  and 
rightly  incui's  men's  distrust.  Now  any  one  can  see  that 
a  theology  which  is  advancing  to  new  ideas  will  stand  in. 
its  peculiar  own  danger  of  being  undevout.  It  is  of  ne- 
cessity involved  in  intellectual  processes.  It  is  more  or 
less  tempted  to  engage  in  controversy.  And  it  has  to 
lose  some  of  the  accumulated  associations  of  which  de- 
vout dispositions  make  so  much,  on  which,  with  many 
people,  they  so  much  depend.  All  of  these  are  conditions 
which  are  unfavorable  to  the  exhibition,  and  in  some  de- 
gree also  to  the  cultivation,  of  devoutness.  Often,  there- 
fore, the  advancing  thinker  will  seem  less  devout  than  he 
reaUy  is.  Often  he  will  be  tempted  to  undervalue  devout- 
ness because  of  some  of  the  narrow  and  fantastic  forms  in 
which  he  has  seen  it  exhibited.     But  he  must  be  devout 


HEALTHY  CONDITIONS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH.  229 

or  he  is  notliing.  It  is  tlie  devout  men  among  the  advanc- 
ing theologians,  such  men  as  Cudworth  and  Hales  and 
Tillotson  and  Schleiennacher  and  Channing  and  Cole- 
ridge and  Maurice,  wlio  have  made  the  real  advances  of 
theology. 

And  yet  it  would  not  be  I'ight  to  say  this  without  say- 
ing also  that  while  advanced  thought  is  bound  to  be  de- 
vout, it  is  bound  also  to  raise  the  standard  of  the  kind  of 
devotion  after  which  souls  are  to  aspii-e.  Devoutness  is 
the  same  quality  in  the  boor  as  in  the  sage,  but  to  say 
that  the  sage  in  vii^tue  of  his  wisdom  does  not  have  the 
chance  opened  to  him  to  be  devouter  after  a  loftier  and 
finer  sort  than  is  possible  for  the  boor  would  be  to  break 
in  pieces  the  unity  of  human  life  and  to  dishonor  some 
of  the  noblest  gifts  of  God.  When  Jesus  came  He  found 
the  Pharisees  devout.  The  truths  which  He  taught  made 
men  capable  of  a  devouter  devotion  than  any  Pharisee 
had  known.  And  in  the  long  run  theological  specidation 
which  claims  to  be  a  true  advance  over  the  speculations 
which  have  preceded  it  must  of  necessity  submit  itself  to 
these  two  tests :  fii-st.  Does  it  still  make  men  devout  as 
the  old  doctrine  did  f  and  second,  Has  it  a  tendency  to 
reveal  and  establish  a  higher  kind  of  devotion  than  tlie 
old,  one  freer  from  superstition  and  more  healthily  eidist- 
ing  all  the  life  of  man  f 

I  need  not  stop  to  say  that  in  its  presentation  of  this 
higher  kind  of  devotion,  the  advancing  thinker  must  often 
disappoint  the  expectations  of  the  older  standards ;  and  so 
advanced  theology,  hoAvever  devout  it  may  know  itself  to 
be,  must  often  be  content  to  be  thought  undevout. 

I  have  space  for  only  a  word  upon  the  other  point. 
Every  change  of  rehgious  thought  ought  to  justify  itself 
by  a  deepened  and  extended  morality.  Here  we  are  on 
far  simpler  ground  than  that  on  which  we  trod  just  now. 
The  manifestations  of  devoutness  are  variable  and  mistak- 


230  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

able.  The  manifestations  of  moral  life  are  in  comparison 
with  them  invariable  and  clear.  About  my  being  humble 
and  full  of  faith  any  man  may  be  mistaken.  About  my 
being  honest  and  pure  it  is  far  less  possible  to  err.  There- 
fore it  is  a  blessed  thing  for  all  reUgions  that  the  stand- 
ards of  morality  stand  clearly  facing  it  and  saying,  "  Can 
you  do  this  f  Can  you  make  men  brave  instead  of  cow- 
ardh",  kind  instead  of  cruel,  true  instead  of  false  ? "  For 
every  new  form  of  religious  thinking  it  is  a  blessed  thing 
that,  full  of  its  first  fresh  enthusiasm,  it  is  compelled  to 
pass  along  the  road  where  the  old  solemn  judges  sit  who 
have  judged  all  the  ages,  the  judges  before  whose  search- 
ing gaze  many  an  ardent  young  opinion  has  withered 
away  and  known  its  wortldessness,  the  judges  who  ask  of 
every  comer  the  same  unchanging  question :  "  Can  you 
make  men  better  menf"  No  conceit  of  spirituality  or 
wisdom  must  make  any  new  opinion  think  it  can  escape 
that  test.  He  who  leaves  the  plain  road  where  the  great 
judges  sit  and  thinks  that  he  can  get  around  behind  them 
and  come  into  the  road  again  beyond  where  they  are  sit- 
ting, is  sure  to  fall  into  some  slough  of  subtlety  and  to 
be  seen  of  men  no  more. 

I  should  be  glad,  if  the  limits  of  this  essay  would  allow, 
to  go  abroad  into  the  fields  of  history  and  gather  illustra- 
tions of  what  I  have  written  from  all  the  great  times  of 
theological  advance.  They  would  be  found  abundantly, 
I  tliink,  first  in  the  time  when  "the  Word  was  made  flesh 
and  dwelt  among  us,"  then  in  the  great  movement  of  the 
Protestant  Eeformation,  and  again  in  what  some  persons 
choose  to  call  the  melancholy  disturbance,  but  what  it  is 
certainly  quite  as  possible  to  consider  the  spiritual  advance 
and  aspirations  of  our  own  time.  I  must  not  hnger  for 
any  such  large  study  as  that  would  be,  but  must  be  con- 
tent Avith  having  pointed  out  how  every  progress  of  relig- 
ious thought  in  order  to  be  healthy  must  be  the  conse- 


HEALTHY  COyDITIOXS  OF  A  CHANGE  OF  FAITH  231 

qnence  not  merely  of  dislodgmeut  from  the  old,  but  of 
temptation  toward  the  new;  must  seek  not  merely  for 
new  notions  and  ideas,  but  for  a  larger  and  deeper  sight 
of  God ;  and  must  test  itself  and  freely  let  itself  be  tested 
by  the  eternal  and  universal  standards  of  devoutness  and 
morahty. 


ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

LITERARY  AND   SOCIAL. 


POETRY. 

(Howard  School,  Alexandria,  Va.,  1859.) 

I  THANK  you  for  this  opportunity  of  joining  in  your 
•■neeting  of  to-night.  It  was  no  slight  puzzle,  I  confess, 
to  find  a  subject  that  was  just  the  tiling  I  wanted.  Not 
that  there  were  so  few,  but  that  there  were  so  many,  all 
clamoring  with  their  fitness  for  a  meeting  and  a  society 
like  yours.  Young  men  with  life  before  us,  w^e  have  prac- 
tically all  life  to  choose  from,  and  take  my  text  where  I 
may,  the  daily  reading  of  some  of  our  experiences  will 
verify  or  confute  it  in  the  course  of  time. 

An  old  book  tells  iis  that  the  Babylonians  had  a  way  of 
bringing  out  their  sick  into  the  public  squares  and  stand- 
ing by  their  side  all  day  begging  each  passer-by  to  recom- 
mend some  medicine  for  the  sick  man's  cure,  and  adds, 
*'  No  stranger  is  so  bad  as  not  to  tell  the  best  he  knows." 
They  let  no  man  pass  till  he  had  tried  to  play  the  doctor. 
Passing  through  your  Babylon  to-night,  you  have  caught 
me  in  the  public  street,  and,  sick  or  well,  demand  of  me 
my  medicine.  Stranger  as  I  am,  I  will  not  be  so  bad  as 
"  not  to  tell  the  best  I  know,"  and  if  you  find  it,  after  all, 
an  old  prescription  that  has  grown  yellow  on  your  files 
already,  give  me  at  least  the  credit  of  sending  you  to  look 
it  up  and  see  if  there  be  not  some  healthy  power  in  it. 

When  one  has  lived  much  among  young  men,  it  needs 
no  particular  discernment  to  discover  that  in  almost  every 
group  among  them  there  is  one  marked  man.    The  others, 

234 


POETRY.  233 

if  you  told  them  that  he  was  their  leader  or  their  better, 
would  reject  the  notion  with  an  honest  sneer ;  but  if  you 
watch  them  daily  you  can  see  that,  though  they  do  not 
know  it,  there  is  something  in  him  that  has  bound  fast 
their  human  loyalty,  always  most  loyal  when  most  uncon- 
scious, and  made  them  his  servants  in  a  servitude  that 
does  them  honor.  They  love  and  try  to  do  the  thing  he 
does,  to  say  the  thing  he  says,  to  be  like  him  in  little  acts, 
because  by  human  mstinct  they  recognize  what  neither 
he  nor  they  have  ever  articulated  from  a  feeling  to  a 
thought,  the  deep,  pure  sentiment  or  principle  or  truth 
which  lies  below  the  thing  he  does  and  the  thing  he  says, 
and  makes  both  Avord  and  act  worth  copjdng  because  they 
are  truly  noble  and  trustworthy  and  true.  Critical  as  we 
are,  and  must  be,  I  pity  from  my  heart  the  man  who  has 
no  pattern  man  whom  lie  can  thoroughly  admire  and 
esteem.  Admire — yes,  wonder  at,  look  at,  as  something 
beyond,  above,  and  truly  better  than  himself;  dreaming 
no  more  of  being  jealous  of  his  superiority  than  you  were 
jealous  of  William  Shakespeare  when  you  wrote  yom*  last 
verses  for  the  paper ;  honoring  his  friend  so  piu-ely  that 
he  himself  is  pm-ified  and  dignified  by  the  worthiness  of 
the  honor  he  bestows.  You  cannot  find  the  man  who 
fully  loves  any  living  thing,  that,  dolt  and  dullard  though 
he  be,  is  not  in  some  spot  lovable  himself.  He  gets  some- 
thing from  his  friend  if  he  had  nothing  at  all  before. 
And  so  these  marked  men  that  stand  forth  among  young 
and  old  for  men  to  love  and  reverence  and  praise  are  the 
great  reservoirs  of  Heaven's  bounty ;  they  are  doing  the 
sun's  work  on  the  earth,  making  dull  moons  and  stars 
that  without  them  would  go  grimly  and  grayly  groping 
through  their  cheerless  life,  all  athi'ob  with  deep  and  rest- 
less fire  as  they  turn  in  Parsee-worship  to  then-  glorious 
Lord. 

Of  course,  to-night,  you  and  I  need  not  go  about  to 


236  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

prove  that  young  men  are  the  best  men.  The  field  is 
ours,  and  we  may  take  it  for  granted  that  most  of  the 
good  deeds  earth  has  seen,  and  so  the  most  of  what  her 
old  eyes  have  still  to  see,  are  done  and  shall  be  done  by 
hands  with  young  blood  throbbing  impatiently  about  their 
finger-tips,  crazy  with  messages  from  fervent,  warm  young- 
hearts,  that  they  will  publish  to  the  world  in  worthy 
deeds.  Let  us  take  for  granted,  too,  the  old  axiom  of  the 
"  reverence  due  from  the  old  to  the  young."  I  have  spoken 
of  the  reverence  due  from  young  men  to  one  another,  of 
how  one  young  man  standing  out  to  claim  a  reverence 
that  is  fairly  his  does  good  to  all  the  rest,  by  charming 
selfishness  into  unselfish  faith  and  kindling  cold  jealousy 
to  admiration. 

If  there  be  one  thing  above  all  things  that  a  man  tries 
to  do,  it  is  io  malxe  something,  and  to  have  something  he 
can  point  to  and  say,  "  See,  were  it  not  for  me  this  thing- 
had  never  been."  He  comes  the  nearest  then  to  being 
superhmnan,  to  getting  outside  of  the  chafing  humanities, 
the  weaknesses,  the  limitations,  the  hard  harness  of  rou- 
tine that  galls  him.  If  you  want  to  know,  then,  what  it  is 
that  gives  one  young  man  such  a  preeminence  above  his 
feUows  as  I  have  spoken  of,  it  is,  I  think,  this  maMng- 
jwwer :  it  is  because  he  can  create  and  they  can  only  alter ; 
it  is  because  things  grow  in  his  mind  from  the  seed, 
and  theii's  are  only  sand  gardens  where  children  stick  up 
rootless  flowers  and  pretend  they  grew  there ;  it  is  because 
he  is — if  you  will  excuse  one  easy  Greek  word  among  so 
many  English — because  he  is  ;ror/jT-/]c;,  which  is  what  we 
call  a  2)oef. 

Even  at  this  late  stage  let  me  announce  my  subject — 
Poetry — the  power  and  purity  of  the  young  man's  life. 

Need  I  tell  you,  after  all  that  has  been  said,  that  poetry 
here  does  not  mean  verse-writing?  I  am  thinking  and 
speaking  of  something  worthier  and  purer  than  a  pretty 


POETRY.  237 

jiugle  at  the  ends  of  lines,  and  if  you  care  to  listen  I  will 
try  to  tell  yon  what  I  mean  by  poetry  being  the  power  of 
our  life. 

I  need  not  remind  you  how  often  in  our  old  English 
writers  the  word  "poet"  catches  its  old  literal  meaning 
and  is  simply  "the  man  who  makes  something."   . 

But  first,  in  brackets,  let  me  say  one  word  about  this 
same  much-abused  verse-writing.  I  am  going  to  ventm-e 
the  broad  assertion  that  all  men  may  be,  and  ought  to  be, 
poets  all  the  tune.  Evidently  I  do  not  mean  by  this  that 
we  ought  each  of  us  individually  to  be  raving  with  that 
rhyme-madness  of  which  we  have  so  much  already.  But 
yet  it  seems  to  me  that  there  are  times  when  it  is  good 
for  any  man  to  perpetrate  a  page  or  two  with  the  lines  end- 
ing similarly.  There  are  moods  of  mind  and  circumstances 
of  condition  when  utterance,  and  utterance  in  that  particu- 
lar form  which  we  call  verses,  is  eminently  healthy.  But 
notice  the  distinction  between  general  and  special  poetry. 
There  is  a  great  deal  of  poetry  that  it  is  perfectly  justifi- 
able to  write  but  utterly  inexcusable  to  show  when  it  is 
written — verses,  like  the  papers  in  lost  pocketbooks,  of  no 
possible  value  except  to  the  owner,  and  yet  of  real  genu- 
ine use  to  him.  They  help  Mm  to  establish  his  identity, 
to  prove  his  right  to  old  hopes  and  thoughts  and  fancies, 
to  his  whole  past  self.  Biit  found  in  a  stranger's  hands, 
they  are  simply  proof  positive  that  he  has  no  right  to 
them.  Up  to  this  mark,  then,  of  poetry  for  private  use, 
it  does  seem  to  me  w^ell  that  every  man  once  in  his  life  at 
least  should  come.  There  are  dumb  hands  feeling  round 
us  that  like  the  mesmerizer's  magic  fingers  must  now 
and  then  find  us  impressible  and  charm  us  into  a  dream. 
There  are  times  when  the  dullest  souls  among  us  fledge 
unguessed-of  ^-ings  and  turn  to  sudden  poets.  There  are 
brooks  whose  singing  is  contagious,  and  sunrises  which 
turn  all  live  men  into  Memnon  statues.     We  find  poems 


23S  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

written  in  the  world  that  we  cannot  help  reading  and 
singing.  Out  of  as  prosaic  a  car- window  as  your  road 
can  boast,  I  saw  God  wi'ite  a  gorgeous  poem  this  very 
morning.  With  a  fresh  sunbeam  for  a  pencil,  on  a  broad 
sheet  of  level  snow,  the  diamond  letters  were  sj^elled  out 
one  by  one  till  the  whole  was  all  aflame  with  poetry.  I 
coidd  have  defied  the  deadest  soul  in  that  hot  car  to  have 
looked  out  of  that  window  and  not  heard  that  song  of  the 
Almighty  sing  itself  within  his  brain. 

So  much  for  our  parenthesis.  If  any  one  of  you  has 
written  poetry  by  stealth  and  is  ashamed  of  it,  don't  show 
it ;  but  if  it  came  from  the  heart,  thank  God  who  put  it 
in  your  heart  to  write  it.  Keep  it  so  long  as  it  can  sing 
itself  to  you.  Only  don't  show  it,  least  of  all  publish  it. 
You  break  the  spell  as  soon  as  any  one  but  yourself  sees  it. 

But  this  is  not  the  poetry  of  which  I  would  principally 
speak.  What  I  would  say  a  few  words  about  is  too  subtle 
far  for  pens  to  carry  or  paper  to  hold.  I  have  reference 
to  poetry  in  its  widest  sense  as  the  great  making-power. 
I  pass  to  that. 

I  believe  that  almost  all  of  us  have  a  closet  in  our  soul 
that  is  not  often  opened.  Now  and  then  we  get  the  door 
ajar,  or  through  a  tiny  gimlet-hole  get  just  a  moment's 
look,  and  wonder  at  the  strange  machinery  that  fills  it.  It 
is  a  perfect  lab}'rinth  of  mechanism  that  we  cannot  under- 
stand. But  what  gives  us  the  strangest  and  the  saddest 
feeling  is  that  in  the  rich  luxuriant  life  of  all  our  other 
nature  this  closetful  is  still  as  death.  Sympathies  and 
desires  and  autij^athies  and  hopes  and  fears  are  all  hud- 
dled in  with  one  another,  but  they  never  stu*  one  another 
nor  by  any  chance  are  jostled  into  motion.  Great  bands 
of  motives  run  over  the  silent  wheels  but  never  turn  them, 
and  loose  limp  springs  lie  like  tired  serpents  among  the 
dead  machinery  that  they  were  meant  to  stir  and  sting  to 
life.    We  are  chilled  at  the  cold  deadness  of  the  place,  and 


POETET.  239 

^o  away  and  sit  down  and  try  to  reason  ourselves  into 
thinking  that  it  was  all  a  dream,  and  there  never  was 
such  a  closet,  and  we  never  went  there,  and  that  we  are 
not  keeping-  the  best  half  of  our  working  nature  useless 
lumber  on  our  hands.  But  there  is  the  closet  still,  with 
its  silent  enginery  going  to  decay,  and  in  our  hearts  there 
is  a  truth  that  answers  to  it.  Man  is  born  with  a  profu- 
sion of  powers  that  are  never  used.  He  is  born  mth  a 
sense  of  beauty,  but  beauty  is  born  and  dies  unnoticed  by 
his  side  every  day.  He  is  born  wdth  an  admiration  for 
the  holiness  of  noble  deeds,  but  noble  deeds  pass  unad- 
mired  into  forgetfulness  before  his  very  eyes.  He  is  born 
with  a  desire  for  friendshij)  with  the  truth,  but  truth  is 
spiu-ned  and  sHghted  every  day.  Meanwhile  there  stand 
the  powers,  there  is  the  old  machinery,  and  now  and  then 
we  get  the  door  ojoen  and  look  in  at  it,  but  the  ke}^  that 
sets  spring  and  wheel  and  band  in  motion  is  lost.  No- 
body seems  to  know  just  where.  I  think  it  must  have 
been  in  the  wild  hurry  of  that  fearful  flight,  when  with 
the  blazing  sword  behind  them  the  man  and  woman  went 
out  from  the  garden  into  the  world.  No  matter  where  or 
when.  The  true  poet  is  the  forger  of  a  new  key,  and  true 
poetry  is  the  grand  moving  again  of  all  that  dead  machi- 
nery. When  sympathy  grasps  hold  of  sympathy,  hope 
seizes  on  affection,  the  whole  nature  moves  anew  and  the 
old  dust  drops  off,  and  dead  eyes  open  and  dead  senses 
start,  and  the  wonderful  richness  of  God's  miracle  of 
beauty  comes  for  the  first  time  on  the  new-created  soul. 
Poetry  is  the  sense  of  beauty,  a  thing  as  much  higher  and 
purer  than  verses  as  a  tree  is  harder  to  make  in  the  green 
glory  of  its  summer  growth  than  its  name  is  to  spell  with 
its  foui"  little  letters.  This,  then,  this  poet-power,  this 
creator-power  of  making  a  world  of  beauty  in  the  soul 
out  of  the  beauty  of  the  earth  outside  of  us,  is  what  makes 
one  young  man  stronger  and  purer  than  his  fellows.    See 


240  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

how  it  gii'ds  him  with  a  new,  a  changeless  strength !    See 
how  it  is  a  new  genesis  of  power  in  him ! 

The  shrewdest  thinker  in  our  coimtry,  in  computing 
the  working-power  of  macliiuer}^  in  the  whole  of  England 
at  the  present  day  as  that  of  three  hundred  million  men, 
estimates  that  one  man  now  is  worth  as  much  in  making- 
power  as  two  hundi'ed  and  fifty  men  were  fifty  years  ago. 
A  working-man  can  do  two  hundred  and  fifty  times  as 
much  now  as  he  could  then,  and  all  because  the  uses  of 
steel  and  steam  and  iron,  of  shaft  and  wlieel  and  pulley, 
have  been  found  out  and  applied.  Just  so  it  is,  I  think, 
in  all  the  Httle  monarchies  within  us.  A  man  malies  more, 
is  more  a  inaJier,  more  a  poet,  the  more  machinery  he  gets 
in  use.  And  so  what  I  mean  by  a  poet  is  just  a  man  who 
uses  aU  his  natm-e,  who,  when  he  finds  he  has  a  sense  of 
beauty,  stops  on  the  brow  of  Shooley  Hill  and  uses  it, 
brings  from  his  closet  all  that  silent  enginery  and  sets  it 
into  work,  makes,  by  the  sympathy  that  is  his  plastic 
power,  the  whole  expanse  of  rich  material  from  one  eye- 
straining  to  the  other — the  blue  hills  in  the  distance,  the 
happy  river  that  is  singing  over  its  message  to  the  sea  for 
fear  it  should  forget  it,  the  dusty  little  city  that  has  crept 
down  to  the  bank  to  drink  its  coolness  and  to  bathe  its 
tired  feet,  the  generous  valley,  dotted  with  tossing  trees  in 
summer  and  with  the  winter  ghosts  of  trees  to-day,  flecked 
with  the  drifting  cloud-shows,  and  haunted  with  the  caw- 
ing birds,  all,  up  to  the  desj^erate  grass-shoot  at  his  feet — 
makes  out  of  this  whole  material  a  thing  that  he  can  carry 
with  him,  and  be  cheered  and  strengthened  by  the  thought 
of  it  as  he  is  cheered  and  strengthened  by  the  sight.  Thus 
once  this  poeUpower  has  put  a  new  something  in  the  man. 
He  finds  again  in  tliis  neglected  closet  a  human  love  for 
nobleness  unused,  and  when  he  uses  it  the  dead  names  in 
his  history  grow  out  of  names  to  men,  and  he  is  stronger 
for  theii'  company  and  for  the  counsel  of  their  lives.     He 


POETRY.  241 

finds  a  human  appetite  for  truth,  and  all  the  old  truisms 
of  the  reading-hook  are  magnetized  into  new  certainties 
of  faith. 

The  poet,  then,  is  the  widest  man  on  earth.  If  England 
stands  firmer  in  the  waves  to-day  because  every  man 
in  her  is  worth  two  hundred  and  fifty  of  his  grand- 
father, then  the  young  man  stands  stronger,  fii-mer,  truer, 
when  he  gets  his  whole  macliinery  to  work.  That  is  the 
time  when  tliis  unseen  leadershij)  is  won — that  moment 
when  the  young  man  fii'st  calls  his  powers  around  him  as 
Adam  did  the  beasts  of  Paradise,  and  gives  them  names. 
That  right  of  naming  vests  him  with  the  right  of  govern- 
ing them  too )  when  he  lays  his  strong  hand  on  their  rest- 
less heads  and  says,  "  This  be  thy  name,"  it  is  that  he  may 
know  them  all  henceforth,  that  they  may  know  him  when 
he  calls  for  them,  and  come  to  minister  of  then-  comfort 
to  his  despaii'ing  weakness.  Do  not  think  these  are  fee- 
ble and  unmanly  dreams.  The  man  who  knows  himself 
hates  and  despises  all  unhealthy  dreams  all  the  more 
heartily  because  of  his  self-knowledge.  He  knows  what 
he  is  about.  He  knows  the  work  that  he  is  doing  is 
manly,  real,  and  true ;  and  other  men  are  sure  to  find  it 
out  and  feel  it  too,  as  they  always  sooner  or  later  reach 
the  truth  about  a  man  who  is  sincere  and  clear.  There 
is  a  great  deal  of  strange  talk  about  the  unhealthiness  of 
fancy  and  imagination.  No  doubt  there  are  unhealthy 
kinds.  They  are  hke  the  stories  authors  write  about  won- 
derful adventui'es  in  wonderful  lands.  Fu-st  there  is  the 
Baron  Munchausen  kind,  where  the  land  is  real  and  has 
old  familiar  names,  but  the  men  and  things  done  are  wild 
and  visionary  and  absurd.  This  is,  I  grant  you,  thor- 
oughly unhealthy  and  untrue.  Then  there  is  the  Robin- 
son Crusoe  kind,  where  the  land  is  unreal,  some  fancied 
island  in  a  fancied  sea,  but  the  men  are  plain  homespun 
brother-men  to  all  of  us.     This  last  is  a  good  deal  better 


242  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

than  tlie  first,  but  it  is  not  quite  right  yet.  The  true  thing 
comes  when  men  of  flesh  and  blood  tread  flat  on  solid 
ground,  and  then  imagination  and  poetry  become  the 
healthiest  diet  of  the  soul.  Out  into  the  world  of  beauty 
God  has  made,  beauty  the  realest  of  all  things  in  it,  goes 
the  man  that  God  made  too.  A  young  man,  you  dare  not 
say,  is  made  less  manly  by  being  made  a  whole  man,  by 
feeling  himself  a  real  person,  in  whole  reality  doing  real 
things  on  real  and  sturdy  ground — nay,  mdening  his  no- 
tions of  reality  till  they  reach  outside  of  earthly  things 
and  live  in  daily  sympathy  with  the  beauty  of  spiritual 
natures.  Such  a  soul  travels  fast.  A  moment's  sunhght 
builds  a  bridge  for  it  to  leap  to  heaven  up  the  shining 
stairs ;  and  then  to  come  back  again  to  earth  and  see  its 
bright  bridge  broken  into  fragments  and  go  on  singing 
through  the  dark  the  snatch  of  angel  song  it  caught  that 
moment  w^hile  it  stood  in  heaven — do  you  say  this  man, 
be  he  old  or  young,  with  all  his  rounded  nature,  is  not 
strong?  I  should  like  to  see  you  by  his  side,  and  see  how 
your  human  heart  would  prove  itself  human  by  gravitat- 
ing to  its  leader  and  its  rightful  lord. 

But  we  find  out  by  and  by  that  there  is  something  bet- 
ter than  to  be  strong,  or  rather  there  is  something  deeper 
out  of  which  strength  springs,  and  that  is  truth.  I  do 
not  know  how  near  to  perfect  truth  a  man  can  get,  but  I 
do  know  that  the  lives  that  many  of  us,  men  and  boys 
alike,  are  living  are  untrue.  Strange  how  soon  the  young 
immortal  learns  the  trick  of  shutting  up  his  eyes  when 
they  are  dazzled  by  an  inconvenient  glory.  Now  here 
the  young  man  who  goes  out  in  poet  spirit  to  read  nature 
finds  that  glory  creeping  in  and  making  his  blindness  self- 
convicted.  His  unreality  meets  face  to  face  with  reahty, 
for  Nature  will  not  stand  a  lie — it  is  her  only  unreclaim- 
able  sin.  She  can  forgive  a  man  anything  else,  but  here 
her  grand  truthfulness  confutes  him.     I  believe  in  this, 


POETRY.  243 

and  trust  not  a  little  to  it.  If,  as  we  profess  to  believe, 
all  right  is  forever  antagonistic  to  all  wrong,  then  what  a 
lesson  there  is  for  us  in  the  steadfast  law  and  faithfulness 
of  all  the  universe  around  us.  How  each  day  coming  to 
its  task  of  crowding  labors,  each  night  bringing  in  its 
blessed  peace  of  sleep  in  obedience  to  the  old  command  of 
Genesis,  brings  with  it  a  remonstrance  against  our  faint- 
heartedness and  constant  wavei-ing  of  loyalty  and  truth. 
The  stars  in  their  courses  fight  against  us  as  they  fought 
against  Sisera.  The  duty  that  they  are  doing  cries  shame 
on  the  duty  that  we  are  leaving  undone  every  day,  I 
know  no  way  in  which  poetry  can  make  our  lives  more 
true  than  by  the  power  that  it  has  to  help  us  to  appreciate 
other  men's  endeavors  after  woi'thy  tilings,  even  if  they 
be  diiferent  from  our  own.  It  is  a  noble  and  a  beautiful 
thing  to  feel  ourselves  outgrowing  our  contempts,  to  recog- 
nize each  day  that  something  which  we  have  been  despis- 
ing as  mean  and  poor  is  high  and  pure  and  rich  in  worth 
and  beauty.  Wliile  this  morning's  sunrise  is  rosy  with 
the  memory  of  last  night's  sunset,  while  noon  looks  long- 
ingly down  the  eastern  sky  that  it  has  traveled,  and  fondly 
onward  to  the  night  toward  which  it  hurries,  while  month 
links  in  with  month,  and  season  works  with  season,  and 
year  joins  hand  with  year  in  the  long  labor  of  the  world's 
hard  life,  there  is  a  lesson  for  us  all  to  learn  of  the  unity 
and  harmony  of  our  existence.  Let  ns  take  the  lesson, 
and  with  it  in  our  hearts  go  out  to  be  more  tolerant,  more 
kindly,  and  more  trne  in  all  our  dealings  with  our  fellow- 
men.  Let  us  carry  it  back  with  us  into  history,  let  us 
carry  it  forward  with  us  in  all  our  dreamings  of  the  years 
to  come.  It  win  make  us  better  and  happier.  For  after 
all  it  is  sympathy,  it  is  love,  it  is  healthy  interest  in  one 
another,  that  all  these  great  teachers  make  their  lesson. 

Every  eartlily  scene  is  imperfect,  as  Eden  was,  without 
man's  presence.     HiUs  and  trees  and  clouds,  waves  on 


244  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  sea-shore,  willows  by  the  river's  side,  fields  with  their 
broad  green  beauty  stretcliing  out  of  sight,  lack  witli  all 
their  loveliness  one  element  of  poetry,  gain  it  only  when 
a  human  home  stands  in  their  midst,  and  the  signs  of 
liuman  work  are  seen  among  them.  Man  may  mar  the 
beauty  of  their  first  creation,  spoil  or  soil  them  with  his 
clumsy  efforts  to  tui-n  them  into  use,  or  even  in  mere 
human  wantonness  take  pleasure  in  turning  the  use  that 
Grod  has  given  them  into  uselessness ;  but,  in  spite  of  all 
this,  earth  gains  more  from  human  life  than  she  suffers 
from  liuman  mischief.  It  gives  a  j)oint  and  purpose  to 
her  life,  gives  her  that  without  which  all  life  is  death. 
Step  now  inside  the  little  world  that  you  and  I  are  carry- 
ing within  us.  Here,  too,  there  is  deficiency  till  man 
comes  in.  The  beauty  of  dumb  nature  may  be  there,  the 
grandeur  of  abstract  truth,  the  delicacy  of  refined  imagi- 
nation, but  unless  there  be  among  them  all  some  home 
of  sympathy  where  om'  fellow-man  may  have  a  dwelling, 
where  he  may  live  the  true  ruler  of  aU  the  nature  around 
him,  the  true  center  of  all  the  world  there,  acknowledged 
and  served  by  it  as  such,  unless  we  feel  for  one  another 
as  well  as  live  with  one  another,  we  have,  consciously  or 
luiconsciously,  a  deep  want  within,  poets  are  things  we  do 
not  comprehend,  and  poetry,  no  wonder,  is  jargon  to  our 
ears. 

The  more  we  love  truth  the  more  we  see  how  true  earth 
is.  Wliat  a  change  the  one  great  opened  eye  of  Christian 
poetry  has  made  in  the  way  men  look  at  Nature  !  Once 
she  was  man's  plaything,  now  she  is  his  teacher  and  his 
queen.  Once  she  was  pretty,  now  she  is  holy.  Take  the 
highest  strain  that  you  can  find  in  the  songs  of  ante-Chris- 
tian singers,  the  most  sublime,  the  most  picturesque,  and 
how  trivial  and  truthless  they  read  beside  the  simple 
music  of  some  untaught  poet  whose  Christian  faith  inter- 


POETRY.  245 

prets  to  him  the  million  parables  that  are  written  in  God's 
cipher  in  the  field,  the  stream,  the  snow. 

Poetry  the  power  and  purity  of  the  young  man's  life. 
I  have  not  been  "  so  bad,"  kind  Babylonians,  "  as  not  to 
tell  the  best  I  knew."  I  will  not  go  without  leaving  my 
prescription  here  to  do  what  good  it  maj^  I  have  spoken 
of  poetry  because  I  believe  our  lives  are  too  prosaic,  be- 
cause I  think  we  all  might  live  up  in  a  purer  aii-.  I  have 
taken  for  granted  all  along  that  we  might  all  be  poets.  I 
beheve  at  least  that  we  all  have  more  poetry  in  us  than 
we  use.  I  tliink  the  strange  beauty  of  the  nature  here 
around  ns  might  be  more  fully  grasped.  I  think  that, 
made  strong  and  jiure  by  thoughts  like  these,  we  all  might 
make  our  hves  to  poems : 

"Be  good,  be  true,  and  let  who  will  be  clever; 
Do  noble  things,  not  sing  them,  all  day  long ; 
And  so  make  life,  death,  and  that  vast  forever, 
One  grand,  sweet  song." 

While  we  are  speaking  of  the  poems  that  may  be  lived, 
does  there  not  come  up  to  every  one  that  ever  read  it  that 
noble  passage  of  Milton  in  Avhich  he  lays  doAvn  the  life 
that  the  true  poet  ought  to  live  before  he  dares  to  write  f 
''  And  long  it  was  not  after  when  I  was  confirmed  in  this 
opinion,"  says  he,  "  that  he  who  would  not  be  frustrate  of 
his  hope  to  wiite  well  hereafter  in  laudable  things,  ought 
himself  to  be  a  true  poem ;  that  is,  a  composition  and  pat- 
tern of  the  best  and  honorablest  things ;  not  presuming 
to  sing  high  praises  of  heroic  men  or  famous  cities  unless 
he  have  in  liimseK  the  experience  and  the  practice  of  all 
that  is  praiseworthy."  I  know  no  poetry'  hke  a  young, 
true  heart,  recognizing  its  duty  to  its  God  and  its  brother- 
man,  going  unflinchingly  about  that  duty,  fearing  no 
taunt,  because  it  is  up  out  of  the  reach   of  taunts  as 


246  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  stars  are  out  of  danger  of  the  storms,  going  to  daily 
work  in  cheerful,  Christian,  manly  faith,  going  straight  up 
where  the  blessing  waits  in  spite  of  sneer  and  pointed 
finger  by  its  side,  standing  strong  in  the  hope  of  things 
unseen,  rich  in  the  chartered  mercy  of  its  God. 

I  cannot  go  before  I  say  that  the  truest  piety  is  the 
truest  poetry  on  earth ;  and  the  young  Christian  has 
crowned  the  strength  and  truth  of  the  poetic  nature  with 
the  thorough  goodness  of  the  perfect  man.  Somehow  the 
stars  take  life  to  do  him  reverence,  and  come  down  thi-ough 
the  puny  taunts  that  thoroughly  prosaic  natures  fling 
against  him,  to  claim  their  brother  who  like  them  is  trying 
to  do  the  work  of  God. 

If  this  old  world  of  ours  ever  grow  poetic,  it  will  be  in 
things  like  this.  Not  in  new  volumes  on  your  shelves 
and  pretty  couplets  in  your  heads,  but  in  the  trueness 
and  the  strength  of  quiet,  earnest  lives  of  duty,  lived  here 
in  Howard  or  wherever  duty  calls,  in  playground  or  in 
pulpit,  in  school-room  or  in  senate-room,  where  men  are 
praising  or  where  the  heart  works  out  its  way  in  silence. 
If  it  be  poetry,  as  I  think  it  is,  to  go  out  to-morrow  morn- 
ing with  all  oui*  closets  open  and  all  our  moral  enginery 
in  play,  ready  to  see  the  miracle  that  the  sun  will  bring 
up  over  the  river  and  the  hills  once  more,  ready  to  learn 
the  lesson  of  the  earth,  a  work  to  do  and  manly  strength 
to  do  it,  ready  to  sympathize  with  and  love  and  worship 
all  that  is  worthy  of  our  sympathy  and  homage,  ready  to 
grow  more  human  in  our  charity  for  man,  ready  to  grow 
more  godlike  in  our  reverence  for  God — if  this  be  poetry, 
then  fifty  poems  may  begin  to-morrow,  with  earth's  grand 
music  for  them  all  to  sing  to,  and  heaven  at  last  to  crown 
the  victor  with  a  sweet  ''  Well  done." 


THE   PURPOSES   OF   SCHOLARSHIP. 

(Phi  Beta  Kappa  Society,  Brown  University,  Providence,  R.  I., 
August  31,  1869.) 

Mr.  President  and  Brethren  :  I  beg  you  to  believe 
that  I  would  not  take  my  place  here  this  morning  without 
gratefully  acknowledging  the  kindness  which  has  bidden 
a  brother  from  another  branch  of  our  one  great  family  to 
come  to  speak  to  you  at  your  anniversary.  I  have  felt  it 
deej^ly,  and  it  has  given  me,  I  think,  a  confidence  which  I 
could  not  other-wise  have  gained. 

Such  anniversaries  as  ours  have  their  clear  character 
and  purpose.  They  are  not  Olympic  contests  for  the  dis- 
play of  oratorical  skill  or  of  intellectual  gladiatorship. 
Still  less  are  they  the  lectures  of  a  teacher  oi-  adept  in  any 
art,  delivered  by  him  in  virtue  of  his  supei'ior  accomplish- 
ment. If  they  were  that,  I  certainly  should  not  be  here 
to-da}'.  They  are  the  gatherings  of  scholars,  met  in  the 
perfect  brotherhood  of  scholarship,  to  consult  with  one 
another,  not  so  much,  if  I  understand  our  name  aright, 
upon  the  interests  of  pure  learning  and  culture  in  them- 
selves, as  upon  their  relations  to  the  manifold  and  tumul- 
tuous life  about  us.  Such  days  are  the  open  windows 
between  the  college  and  the  world,  through  which  they 
look  in  upon  and  learn  to  respect  and  profit  by  each  other. 
The  relations  of  philosoph}^  and  life  in  some  shape  or  other 
must  be  the  theme  of  such  meetings.  It  is  the  largest, 
the  most  practical,  and  the  most  constant  of  all  subjects, 
and  it  is  the  one  which  is  peculiarly  pressing  and  continu- 
ally reappearing  in  our  midst  to-da3\     This  makes  it  not 

247 


248  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  more  easy  but  the  more  welcome  topic  to  select  for 
the  guidance  of  our  thoughts. 

I  am  to  speak  to  you  this  morning,  by  your  kind  per- 
mission, of  the  purposes  of  scholarship. 

To  one  who  at  all  comprehends  the  infinite  range  of  the 
ideal  scholarship,  the  name  of  scholar  becomes  the  hum- 
blest that  he  can  assume — one  that  he  is  ready  with  the 
largest  charity  to  grant  to  any  earnest,  intelligent,  and 
laborious  seeker  after  truth.  Once  realize  truth  as  infi- 
nite, and  then  it  becomes  hopeless  in  an  instant  to  dream 
of  being  scholars  in  au}^  sense  of  complete  attainment, 
and  the  only  ground  which  is  left  is  that  of  faithful  effort. 
We  must  call  any  intelligent  man  a  scholar  who  with  cou- 
rage and  conscience  (the  two  fundamental  requirements 
and  tests  of  true  scholarship)  is  seeking  in  any  right  direc- 
tion for  the  truth.  Else,  in  the  endless  variety  of  degrees, 
all  so  infinitely  far  from  the  ideal  perfectness,  I  do  not 
know  where  we  shall  draw  the  line.  In  general,  we  draw 
no  clear  lines ;  but  by  a  certain  touch  or  flavor  which  be- 
longs to  certain  lives  we  separate  them  instinctively  as 
scholarly  lives,  giving  a  sort  of  designation  Avhose  fitness 
we  feel  more  than  we  can  define  it,  but  whose  essence,  as 
far  as  we  can  reach  it,  seems  to  lie  in  this,  courage  and 
conscience  in  seeking  for  the  truth.  I  would  say  this  at 
the  outset  in  order  that  some  of  us  may  be  sure  of  the 
right  which  we  have  in  such  a  discussion  as  is  before  us, 
and  that  we  may  be  sm-rounded  through  it  all  by  the 
earnestness  and  humbleness  Avhich  is  the  true  atmosphere 
of  scholarship. 

Whether  we  draw  oiu*  lines  or  not,  then,  here  there  are 
before  almost  all  men's  minds  two  things  clearly  distinct, 
philosophy  and  life.  Here  are  two  sets  of  men,  one  gath- 
ering knowledge,  the  other  living  life.  Here  are  two  kinds 
of  houses  standing  side  b}-  side,  the  college  and  the  store. 
The  two  sorts  of  men  may  both  be  represented  in  one  sin- 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCHOLARSHIP.  249 

gle  man's  life.  The  same  man  may  be  both  learning  and 
living.  But  if  so,  it  is  clearly  understood  that  there  are 
two  men  within  that  single  figure.  The  two,  scholarship 
and  life,  are  separate  from  each  other.  What  have  they 
to  do  with  each  other  ?  That  is  the  question  which  grows 
very  pressing  in  these  times  of  ours. 

And  the  purposes  of  what  is  called  life — the  ordinary 
pi»actical  labors  of  mankind  are  so  evident,  they  bear  their 
own  justification  so  clearly  before  men,  that  the  question 
almost  always  comes  upon  the  other  side,  and  scholarship 
is  called  on  to  announce  its  purposes  and  to  give  a  suffi- 
cient reason  for  its  being  in  the  world. 

And  it  does  not  slirink  from  the  demand.  It  does  stand 
up  aud  give  its  reason.  Tlie  only  trouble  is  tliat  it  gives 
too  many  reasons,  and  men  find  themselves  bewildered 
with  two  different  theories  of  scholarship,  each  pretty 
clearly  marked,  which  are  set  forward  for  their  satisfac- 
tion. You  know  what  those  two  are,  for  around  their 
contest  whirl  and  rage  all  the  wild  battles  of  our  modern 
education. 

The  first  asserts  the  simple  worth  of  pure  knowledge 
for  its  own  pure  sake.  It  does  not  look  to,  does  not  care 
for,  the  ultimate  uses  of  the  truth  it  seeks  to  learn.  It 
believes,  with  Bacon,  that  "  whatever  is  wortliy  of  exis- 
tence is  worthy  also  of  knowledge,  which  is  the  image  of 
existence."  "These  things  are  in  the  world  here.  Let 
me  know  them.  That  is  use  enough  for  me  to  put  them 
to.  Must  I  show  you  just  how  they  will  make  you  warmer 
or  merrier  or  richer  before  you  give  me  leave  to  learn 
them '? "  It  is  a  noble  impulse.  It  is  impossible  to  con- 
ceive of  true  scholarship  among  us  unless  some  provision 
is  made  for  its  gratification.  We  are  coming,  and  we 
must  come  soon,  or  we  shall  suffer  deeply,  to  some  provi- 
sion in  connection  with  our  universities  for  this  appetite 


250  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

of  pure  learning.  "We  must  bear  to  see  men  misers  in 
knowledge,  gathering  it  for  itself,  not  for  its  uses. 

Tlie  other  theory  we  all  know  still  better,  by  the  impa- 
tient eagerness  wdth  which  it  runs  riot  everywhere  al:)out 
US  nowadays.  All  scholarship  must  minister  immediately 
to  life.  Human  wealth  and  warmth  and  happiness,  these 
are  the  final  causes.  What  that  does  not  make  these  be 
has  any  right  to  be  itself  ?  We  may  waste  wdiat  indigna- 
tion we  will  upon  the  commercial  theories  of  learning,  yet 
the  world  believes  them,  is  clamoring  for  them,  and  they 
have  their  beauty  and  trutli.  The  picture  of  the  waiting 
world,  lying  expectant  until  the  fair  heaven  of  knowledge 
above  it  is  willing  to  let  its  glory  and  loveliness  distil  a 
fruitful  rain  and  dew,  to  make  the  dead  heart  alive  and 
glad,  this  is  the  noble  and  the  everlastingly  true  and 
touching  aspect  of  the  utilitarian  theory  of  scholarship. 

Between  the  two,  I  said,  the  world  hovers  in  doubt,  not 
really  knowing  what  the  true  purposes  of  scholarship) 
are.  It  is  not  the  world  alone  that  doubts.  Where  is 
the  scholar  that  can  tell  ?  The  strangest  thing  about  it 
all  is  that  just  now,  when  we  are  full  of  the  passion  of 
study  as  no  age  has  ever  been  before,  we  should  almost 
of  a  sudden  wake  up  to  find  that  we  can  give  no  clear  ac- 
count of  what  the  purpose  of  all  our  study  is.  One  man 
says  this,  and  another  man  as  confidently  says  the  other. 
Perhaps,  strange  as  it  is,  it  is  not  altogether  a  bad  thing 
to  find.  Perhaps  it  is  only  a  witness  of  the  great  dej^tli 
and  reality  of  that  divine  instinct  after  knowledge  which, 
with  the  other  great  human  proof  qualities,  the  love  of 
country,  the  love  of  children,  the  love  of  freedom,  the  hate 
of  falsehood,  lies  deep  under  all  our  being  and  will  give 
us  no  account  of  itself,  but  fills  us  and  our  lives  with 
strength  and  beauty  nevertheless.  Such  inability  to  give 
a  reason  does  not  jn-ove  the  absence  of  a  reason,  certainly. 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCHOLARSHIP.  251 

The  vagueness  is  not  the  stagnation  of  dead  ideas,  but  the 
seeming  uiisettledness  and  hesitation  at  the  meeting  of 
two  waves  of  live  ideas  where  the  stream  seems  only  agi- 
tated without  a  purpose,  but  is  really  moving  on  seaward 
all  the  time.  The  two  theories  of  learning  are  in  endless 
struggle,  but,  after  all,  it  is  like  the  struggle  of  the  gods 
in  Valhalla,  who  fight  and  cut  and  wound  one  another  all 
day,  and  come  at  night  all  fresh  and  whole  to  Odin's  Halls 
to  eat  and  drink  together  like  brethren,  and  rule  the  world 
in  perfect  harmony.  At  the  bottom  they  are  not  enemies 
but  friends.  This  is  oiu'  hope  and  confidence,  and  this 
allows  us  to  be  calm  and  patient  in  all  the  disturbance  of 
this  great  question  of  the  purposes  of  scholarship. 

It  is  a  great  question,  and  it  is  not  one  that  stands  by 
itself.  I  know  hardly  a  question  which  agitates  the  minds 
of  thoughtful  men  to-day,  whether  it  be  the  question  of 
the  classical  and  scientific  educations,  or  the  question  of 
science  and  faith  in  religion,  or  the  Cjuestion  of  intuitive 
utilitarian  morality,  the  most  abstract  question  of  the 
metaphysics  or  the  most  practical  problems  of  labor  and 
government,  which  does  not  either  spring  from,  or  is  in 
some  close  way  akin  to,  this  old  cpiestiou  of  the  proper 
purposes  of  scholarshij). 

How  old  the  question  is,  and  how  various  have  been 
the  answers  that  men  have  given  it  by  the  practical  uses 
which  they  have  made  of  the  knowledge  they  have  won  ! 
I  look  back  over  the  history  of  scholarship  in  the  broad 
sense  in  which  I  have  ventiu-ed  to  use  the  word  to-day ;  I 
look  around  upon  the  scholarshij)  of  our  own  times,  and 
everywhere  it  seems  to  me  that  four  great  aspects  com- 
prehend the  purposes  of  all  the  men  whom  I  behold,  in 
library  or  lecture-room,  in  the  forest  or  the  crowds  of 
fellow-men  fulfilling  the  function  of  the  scholar,  cou- 
rageously and  conscientiously  pursuing  truth.  Either  as 
prophet,  philosopher,  ruler,  or  saint,  or  in  some  combina- 


252  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

tion  of  two  or  three  of  these  characters,  these  studying 
men  aspn*e  to  go  forth  with  the  results  of  their  education. 
I  wish  to  speak  of  the  scholar  in  each  of  these  aspects  for 
a  little  while,  and  so  gather,  if  we  may,  out  of  them  all 
some  large  conception  of  the  purposes  to  which  in  some 
sense  and  degree  all  our  lives  profess  to  be  devoted. 

1.  The  scholar  as  prophet.  Let  us  speak  first  of  him. 
The  name  carries  us  back  in  a  moment  to  the  remarkable 
series  of  men  who  for  over  a  thousand  years  gave  sub- 
stance and  character  to  the  commonwealth  and  kingdom 
of  the  ancient  Hebrews.  What  shall  we  say  ?  Shall  we 
number  the  Hebrew  prophets  in  the  list  of  scholars  and 
count  them  the  t^'pes  of  one  great  function  of  the  scholar 
which  has  run  through  every  age  ?  Surely,  nothing  but 
a  very  bookish  pedantry  could  be  bhnd  to  the  large  claim 
which  they  present  to  the  great  name.  Courage  and  con- 
science after  the  ti'utli !  Where  have  those  ever  been  as 
perfect  as  tliej  were  with  them  ?  They  were  not  the  book- 
men of  their  time.  But  then,  as  often,  true  learning  had 
fled  from  the  blindness  of  the  men  of  books  and  set  her 
perfect  presence  before  the  pure  eyes  of  earnest  men, 
whose  truthfulness  was  to  them  the  power  of  a  superior 
insight.  They  were  men  of  study ;  history,  law,  external 
nature,  the  human  mind,  the  divine  oracles — all  these  they 
had  pondered  to  their  depths.  They  had  broad  sight  of 
how  it  stood  in  the  universe.  They  had  struggled  after 
and  attained  the  vastest  grasp  of  nature  and  the  super- 
natural, the  simplest  and  profoundest  view  of  how  they 
were  related  to  each  other.  They  held  the  clearest  phi- 
losophy of  duty  that  any  scholar  has  ever  taught.  And 
truth,  <jrod's  truth,  was  the  bread  of  their  only  hunger  and 
the  water  of  their  only  thirst.  And  clearly,  sharply,  as 
the  very  essence  and  spring  of  all  their  mental  labor,  there 
stood  out  its  purpose,  the  strong  Dwral  mission  which 
makes  those  prophets  so  completely  the  guides  and  rehuk- 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCHOLARSHIP.  253 

ers  of  tlieir  people,  that  it  sounds  strangely  to  us  when 
we  hear  them  called  their  scholars  too.  But  we  cannot 
have  such  a  morality  as  theirs  without  a  mighty  intellec- 
tuality behind  it,  nay,  in  it,  and  vivifying  it  all  through. 
The  Hebrew  propliet  knew  but  one  end  of  truth,  to  make 
that  Hebrew  people  better.  Ever}^  idea  was  a  command- 
ment, every  ecstasy  of  thought  made  the  conscience  trem- 
ble with  aAve  as  well  as  the  mind  quiver  with  delight. 
Knowledge  was  nothing  to  him  but  new  inspiration  for 
goodness,  new  force,  new  reason,  new  beauty  thrown  into 
the  "  thou  shalts  "  and  "  thou  shalt  nots  "  of  the  decalogue. 
And  as  he  studied,  beyond  the  Book,  beyond  the  nature, 
beyond  the  manhood  which  was  his  immediate  lesson, 
there  always  stood  ujd  as  the  glorious  prize  of  all,  to  be 
longed  for  and  labored  for  until  he  died,  the  image  of 
a  righteous  humanity,  alwaj^s  in  the  Hebrew  type  and 
circumstances,  but  always  intensely  human  because  the 
morality  is  the  center  of  the  human  life,  and  so  a  prize 
the  desire  of  which  may  be  understood  and  shared  by 
the  prophet-scholars  of  all  time.  It  has  been  shared  in. 
Everywhere  the  prophet-scholars  have  stood  forth.  That 
temper  which  is  unable  to  separate  between  the  true  and 
the  good,  which  is  entirely  intolerant  of  pure,  unmoral 
speculation,  which  is  impatient  with  any  idea  that  is  not 
always  knocking  at  the  barred  gates  of  some  fortified 
wickedness,  or  hammering  at  the  chains  of  ojjpression,  or 
blazing  across  the  thick,  pestilential  marsh  of  some  foul 
conception,  this  is  one  phase  of  the  seholarshij)  of  the 
world  which  no  one  can  ignore. 

Its  dangers  are  evident  enough.  It  will  certainly  ex- 
pose the  pure  truth  to  be  colored  and  twisted  by  the  pas- 
sions and  fanaticisms  of  the  moral  sense.  It  is  the  very 
birthplace  of  prejudice  and  superstition,  this  home  where- 
in thought  and  conscience  are  passionately  wedded.  It 
is  the  nursery  of  pious  frauds.     Jesuitism  has  come  forth 


254  ESSAYS  AND   ADDKESSES. 

from  it,  the  popish  and  the  Protestant  sects  ahke.  But, 
all  the  while,  men  have  clung  to  it.  They  have  known 
that  the  moral  nature  is  the  central  humanity,  and  that 
whatever  would  claim  the  highest  honor  must  bind  itself 
close  to  that.  They  have  known  that  in  the  long,  large 
aspects  of  history,  increased  knowledge  must  mean  in- 
creased goodness,  or  else  the  imperious  conscience  would 
of  necessit}^  condemn  man  to  the  rudimentary  virtues  of 
barbarism  and  ignorance.  Above  all,  only  here  has  schol- 
arship claimed  for  itself  religiousness  and  seemed  to  be 
the  true  service  of  that  God  in  wliom  goodness  and  wis- 
dom meet  and  are  but  one.  So  that  always  the  prophet- 
scholar  has  been  among  men. 

If  we  understand  aright  our  country  and  our  time,  it  is 
the  prophetship  of  the  scholar  which  men  are  looking  for 
and  not  seeming  to  themselves  to  find.  The  cry  of  the 
land  is  for  a  moral  influence  to  go  out  from  our  schools 
and  colleges  and  studies  to  rebuke  and  to  reform  the 
corruption  and  the  sin  which  are  making  even  the  coldest- 
blooded  man  tremble  when  he  dijjs  his  foot  into  some 
brink  of  the  sea  of  pohtics  or  sails  outside  of  a  few  well- 
grounded  creeks  and  bays  of  the  great  ocean  of  social 
life.  This  we  must  not  dare  to  hide  from  ourselves,  that 
the  people  at  large  do  not  believe  that  the  learned  men 
care  how  bad  the  country  is,  and  so  the  people  do  not 
care  deeply  for  nor  much  fear  the  learned  men.  They  see 
this  strange  phenomenon,  that  political  corruption  enters 
among  what,  with  our  standards  of  education,  are  called 
the  educated  classes,  as  much  or  more  than  among  men 
who  can  scarcely  read  or  write.  They  do  not  see  issuing 
from  the  homes  of  thought  of  the  country  any  such  strong 
influence  of  mental  and  spiritual  culture  as  can  meet  and 
modify  and  regulate  and  elevate  the  purely  commercial 
disposition  of  a  trading-people.  Our  common-school  sys- 
tem, popular  as  it  is,  goes  laboring  under  a  certain  dis- 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCHOLARSHIP.  255 

trust  among  many  tliong'litful  people  who  dread  for  the 
country  the  perils  of  universal  half -knowledge,  who  fear 
its  irreligiousness,  and  would  gladly  sacrifice  something 
of  the  thoroughness  of  its  training  for  a  larger  moral  and 
spiritual  power  poured  through  its  veins.  A  wide  suspi- 
cion of  the  morality  of  scholarship  lias  grown  up  among 
us,  and  it  is  not  good.  For.  be  the  virtues  of  untaught 
humanity  as  generous  and  gracious  as  they  may,  the  per- 
manence and  breadth  of  a  people's  true  moral  life  must 
lie  in  the  attaimnent  and  emancipation  of  its  scholarship. 
Out  of  it  must  come  the  wisest  judgments,  the  most  valu- 
able praises,  and  the  sternest  censure.  The  scholar  is  dis- 
graced if  the  nation  go  mad  with  cheating,  and  his  hand 
is  never  laid  cool  and  severe  with  truth  on  its  hot  fore- 
head. Woe  to  a  land  whose  scholarship  is  not  its  prophet. 
Woe  to  a  scholarship  itself  that  dares  forget  or  disuse  its 
right  and  duty  of  free  and  open  prophecy. 

2.  Let  us  pass  to  another  theory  of  the  purposes  of 
scholarship,  the  most  different  fi'oni  that  which  we  have 
been  describing.  Farthest  from  the  scholar  who  seeks 
for  all  his  learning  a  moral  influence  upon  the  world  there 
is  the  other  scholar,  for  whom  pure  truth,  independent 
of  all  uses  and  applications,  the  simple  facts  of  life  and 
nature,  is  itself  sufficient  prize.  This,  too,  is  very  noble 
in  its  highest  aspects.  "  There  can  be  nothing  higher 
than  the  truth,"  it  says.  Not  because  it  is  useful,  but  be- 
cause it  is  true,  the  fact  is  worthy  of  a  man's  whole  life 
to  seek,  his  whole  soul  to  hold.  Here,  too,  we  have  our 
historic  type  of  the  scholar  we  describe.  He  is  distinc- 
tively the  philosopher,  the  lover  of  the  pure  truth  for  its 
own  pure  beauty,  and  that  name  carries  us  back,  past  all 
other  wearings  of  it,  till  it  sets  us  among  the  wonder- 
ful men  who  illustrated  Greek  history  four  centuries  be- 
fore Chi'ist,  and  who  have  made  the  world  a-light  ever 
since  with  the  glory  of  the  Greek  philosophy.     Matthew 


25G  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

Arnold,  the  brilliant  essayist  of  culture,  lias  depicted  the 
Hel;)raistic  and  the  Hellenistic  tendencies  as  the  j30wers 
of  action  and  of  thought  in  their  endless  conflict  for  prece- 
dence. I  would  speak  of  them  as  two  schools  of  thought ; 
or,  rather,  as  two  different  conceptions  of  the  purposes  of 
thought  and  knowledge.  I  do  not  speak  of  separate  Greek 
masters  or  of  specific  schools ;  I  do  not  speak  of  any  of 
the  characteristics  of  that  marvelous  culmination  of  human 
thought  and  inquiry  except  this  one — that  it  was  pure 
and  simple ;  for  knowledge,  not  for  man  ;  for  the  increase 
of  wisdom,  not  in  order  that  men  might  be  better  or  richer, 
nay,  nor  even  iviser,  but  only  that  their  goddess  might  be 
magnified.  Other  characteristics  have  repeated  them- 
selves elsewhere  in  the  history  of  human  stud3^  This 
has  never  been  rivaled — never  has  knowledge  itself,  as  an 
end,  as  a  complete  and  perfect  being,  been  so  supremely 
crowned.  Their  sacred  word  ''wisdom"  found  its  way 
across  into  the  opposite  Hebrew  world,  but  there  it  gath- 
ered in  a  moment  moral  associations  which  lost  the  pure, 
bare,  classic  simplicity  of  the  Greek  origin.  Truth  unhu- 
man,  divine,  lighting  men  but  not  made  to  light  them — 
as  far  off  as  the  stars,  as  silent,  as  impassive,  as  single- 
eyed  for  the  running  of  its  own  silver  orbit. 

There  were  exceptions  and  qualifications.  Men  were 
men  still,  even  although  they  were  philosophers.  Out  of 
some  contact  of  their  daily  lives,  or  out  of  some  human 
heart  of  their  philosophy  itself,  some  humanness,  some 
care  for  man,  would  find  its  way  among  them,  as  either 
from  the  long-left  shore  or  from  the  worn  substance  itself, 
dust,  they  tell  us,  will  gather  on  the  masts  and  spars  of 
ships  out  in  mid-ocean.  But,  with  all  qualifications,  the 
Greek  philosopher  stands  still,  and  no  doubt  stands  rightly, 
as  the  type  of  the  ]3ure  seeker  after  knowledge. 

It  is  a  cold  mind,  chilled  with  the  forlornest  utilitarian- 
ism, that  does  not  kindle  somewhat  at  the  very  calmness 


TEE  PURFOSES   OF  SCHOLABSHIF.  257 

and  still  beauty  of  such  a  theory  of  knowledge.  It  is  a 
blind  eye,  blinded  by  too  close  scrutiny  of  a  few  narrow 
means  of  usefulness  alone,  which  does  not  see  that  in  some 
departments  and  by  some  men  study  can  be  pursued  only 
in  this  (ireek  way.  It  has  its  dangers.  Those  Greeks 
themselves  in  all  their  highest  walks  were  always  trem- 
bling on  the  verge  of  sophism,  and  the  weak  heads  among 
them  toppled  and  fell  in.  That  Avhich  is  a  lofty  ambition 
when  it  deals  with  large,  living  things — the  love  of  facts 
as  facts — becomes  but  miserable  pedantry  and  dilettant- 
ism when  it  comes  to  waste  itself  on  little  dead  trifles. 
The  research  that  is  sublime  when  it  is  asking  questions 
of 'the  stars  or  the  flowers  or  the  nations  goes  down  at 
last  to  the  petty  gossip  of  the  local  antiquarian  society. 
There  is  a  scholarship  which  cannot  see  the  forest  for  the 
trees — cannot  see  the  truth  for  the  facts.  What  matter  ? 
Let  it  catalogue  the  trees,  and  some  man,  truly  the  schol- 
ar, shall  come  some  day  and  see  it  aU,  and  cry,  '  Behold, 
a  forest !  "  and  paint  it  in  its  freshness  with  the  breeze 
through  it  and  the  life  in  it  for  the  world  to  see. 

So  that,  with  all  its  dangers  granted,  the  pure  phi- 
losophy is  very  noble.  It  must  bear  fruit  that  it  never 
contemplates  or  cares  for.  We  do  not  think  that  the  sun 
counts  the  grass-blades  or  shines  for  them.  Let  a  man 
tell  me,  out  of  the  wondrous  revelation  of  the  spectrum, 
what  the  sun  is,  and  I  will  not  ask  that  he  shall  show  me 
just  how  his  knowledge  is  to  make  two  grass-blades  grow 
instead  of  one.  I  wlM  believe  that  such  knowledge  cannot 
be  in  the  world  without  men's  being  somehow  the  better 
for  it.  So  I  will  have  more  faith  in  the  philosopher's 
wisdom  than  even  the  philosopher  cares  to  have. 

Again  we  turn  to  our  own  time.  In  many  departments 
do  we  not  see  a  craving  for  pure  knowledge  ?  Men  have 
grown  suspicious  of  knowledge  collected  and  used  with  a 
professed  and  preA^ous  purpose.     In  science  they  have 


258  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

learned  to  fear  that  facts  have  been  misread  in  order  to 
suit  some  preconceived  ideas  of  truth  and  right.  In  his- 
tory they  have  learned  to  suspect  that  characters  and  in- 
stitutions have  come  down  to  them  colored  by  the  thick 
atmospheres  of  party  zeal  or  personal  like  or  dislike.  In 
rehgion,  half  the  loose  skepticism  of  the  time  comes  of  a 
vague  misgiving  that  eternal  truth  in  some  trick  of  inter- 
pretation has  been  made  to  serve  the  purpose  of  a  pious 
expediency.  In  all  there  is  an  instinctive  appeal,  which 
it  is  good  to  hear,  for  the  pure  truth — for  the  image  as 
little  as  possible  mixed  and  distorted  with  the  nature  and 
position  of  the  mirror  that  reflects  it — for  pure  and  posi- 
tive science.  ''  Let  us  know  just  what  the  fact  is,  just 
how  the  matter  stands,  and  we  will  stand  wdth  it."  Even 
if  he  does  not  hear  and  is  not  any  way  seeking  to  obey 
that  call,  what  we  need,  what  we  must  have  along  with 
the  prophet,  is  this  philosopher  who  shall  bring  forth  the 
clear,  cold  truth  of  things,  whicli  men  enough  will  take  up 
into  warm,  effective  life. 

3.  There  is  a  third  view  of  the  purposes  of  scholarship, 
which  is  different  from  both  these  two.  The  first  of  these 
has  regarded  learning  as  moral  influence.  The  second 
has  been  content  to  value  it  solely  for  the  truth  that  it 
accumulated.  This  other  considers  it  as  so  much  force 
or  power  to  be  applied  to  the  government  of  men.  The 
world  is  full  of  work  to  do,  of  powers  to  control.  What 
force  can  the  man  of  books  and  of  ideas  exert  to  turn 
other  men  at  his  will?  What  anfhoritij  can  he  summon 
out  of  the  special  life  he  lives  to  make  hiin  a  ruler  among 
fellow-mortals  ?  And  to  be  a  ruler  is  one  of  those  ambi- 
tions so  universal,  so  natural,  that  argument  with  it  is 
useless.  Government  is  good;  and  all  that  will  make 
government  forceful  men  will  seek  with  their  whole  pas- 
sion for  being  governors.  And  so  when  scholarship  offers 
her  discipline,  promising  to  train  the  man  like  an  athlete 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCHOLARSHIP.  259 

for  endless  human  struggie,  then  to  some  men,  to  some 
natures,  she  makes  her  most  attractive  offer.  She  offers 
to  reduce  the  mere  unavaihiLle  bulk  which  hampers  action, 
by  relieving-  her  disciple  of  prejudices  and  falsehoods  and 
superstitions,  so  he  may  l.)e  sure  of  carrying  nothing  with 
him  that  will  fail  him  ^\dien  the  conflict  comes.  She  offers 
to  make  every  muscle  firm  by  sending  j^roo/  along  the 
flaccid  fiber  of  opinion  and  mailing  the  mental  impulse 
persistent  with  certainty.  She  tempts  men  with  the  strong 
temptation  of  force. 

If  we  look  for  our  historic  type  again  we  shall  find  it, 
doubtless,  no  longer  in  Hebrew  or  in  Greek,  but  in  the 
scholarly  type  of  that  majestic  nation  which  must  alwaj-s 
represent  the  thoughts  of  force  and  government  in  history. 
It  is  the  Roman  scholar  who  most  clearly  apprehends  and 
most  deeply  values  the  power  of  the  things  he  knows 
to  work  results,  to  do  work  in  the  world.  His  religious 
truth  is  no  mere  sentiment,  no  holy  aspiration,  no  insight 
into  the  spiritual  mystery.  It  must  hold  the  mass  in 
order  and  help  to  rule  the  state.  His  study  of  mankind 
groups  itself  not  into  theoi'ies  of  humanity  but  into  codes 
of  law.  His  philosophy,  be  it  Stoic  or  Epicurean,  is  no 
sj^stem  of  pure  speculation.  It  is  chosen  for  and  valued 
by  its  power  to  shape  a  life  for  the  labor  of  the  world,  to 
make  it  strong  to  rule  other  lives,  or,  in  the  sadder  days 
of  a  despotism  which,  summing  all  force  up  into  itself, 
rendered  that  hopeless,  strong  to  rule  itself.  It  is  the 
loorJi  that  learning  is  to  do,  the  force  that  is  to  come  with 
it  to  the  learned  man. 

The  question  becomes  interesting  when  we  turn  and 
ask  how  far  this  idea  of  learning  as  force  prevails  among 
us — how  far  it  is  desirable  that  it  should  prevail.  Vaguely, 
no  doubt,  we  hold  it.  Knowledge  is  strength,  we  say,  in 
general.  But  practicall}^  we  do  not  look  to  see  the  imme- 
diate forces  which  work  on  men  emanate  from  scholarship. 


260  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDEESSES. 

You  scholars  do  not  claim  to  rule  the  country  or  soeiet3^ 
There  is  a  most  uu-Romau  satisfaction  that  things  should 
go  on  as  they  please — anybody  governing  the  country  and 
nobody  governing  society,  while  the  scholars  are  content 
to  believe  that  their  scholarship  resides  like  a  sort  of  at- 
mosphere behind  the  turmoil  of  second  causes,  and  does 
somehow  send  out  influences  which  are  really  the  rulers 
of  the  whole,  which  ma}^  be  or  may  not  be  true — it  is  hard 
to  tell. 

Wherever  there  is  any  idea  of  an  educated  class  as  a 
governing  class ;  wherever  some  vagary  of  our  suffrage 
suggests  the  far-off  possibihty  of  a  limitation  of  that  privi- 
lege by  education  which  it  is  at  once  wrong  and  hopeless 
with  us  to  limit  by  any  other  arbitrary  test ;  whenever  a 
college  wakes  up  an  instant  to  the  necessity  of  teaching 
something  about  the  politics  and  histor}^  of  the  countr}^ 
which  they  are  to  live  in  and  which  they  ought  to  aspire 
to  rule  to  the  young  scholars  under  its  charge ;  wherever 
we  truly  seize  the  idea  of  the  Republic,  which  is  self-gov- 
ernment perfected  by  education,  education  being  as  truly 
a  part  of  the  idea  as  government ;  in  all  the  application  of 
profound  study  to  the  jDresent  problems  of  social  science, 
labor,  trade,  food,  poverty,  crime,  prisons,  seeking  to  regu- 
late them  by  intelligible  principles  instead  of  by  interest 
or  whim ;  in  all  the  scientific  perfecting  of  processes,  moral, 
political,  mechanical,  that  bring  a  little  nearer  the  day 
of  peace  and  sweep  a  little  farther  from  the  earth  the  un- 
christian enormity  of  war — in  all  these  we  have  attempts 
to  realize  in  special  directions  what  we  know  is  generally 
true  all  the  time,  the  force  of  scholarship,  the  power  of 
the  scholar  as  a  worker  and  a  ruler  in  the  world.  Surely 
the  millennial  perfectness  is  as  far  off  here  as  anj^where 
in  the  whole  range  of  our  life. 

4.  One  other  suliject  of  scholarly  ambition  still  remains. 
I  spoke  of  it  as  the  ambition  of  the  saint.     The  word  is 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCHOLABSHIP.  261 

colored  through  and  througrh  Avith  accidental  meanings, 
but  I  do  not  know  what  other  word  will  take  its  place. 
Its  essential  notion  is  of  the  personal  character.  I  would 
strip  it  of  every  other  association  and  let  it  signify  to  us 
simply  this,  the  man  of  character.  He  has  put  everything 
else  aside.  The  w^orld's  progress  is  little  or  nothing  to 
him.  He  may  despau'  of  it  entirely.  The  interests  of 
pure  truth  and  science  are  too  vague  and  shadowy  for  his 
intense  and  eager  gaze.  There  is  one  thing  and  hardly 
more  for  him  in  all  the  world,  this  personal  life  of  his, 
this  capacity  of  being  something  good  and  true,  of  ripen- 
ing to  its  possible  best  his  own  special  seed  of  humanity. 
He  may  be  more  or  less  distinctiveh^  and  consciously  re- 
ligious. The  special  sort  of  character  which  he  desires 
and  seeks  will  be  determined,  of  course,  in  part  by  his 
times  and  circumstances,  largely  by  his  personal  nature. 
If  scholarship  be  offered  to  him  its  treasures  will  be  all 
swept  into  this  one  current,  the  personal  cultui-e,  the  per- 
fection of  the  single  soul. 

Here,  too,  our  historical  specimen  is  not  hard  to  find, 
except  that  everywhere  and  always  the  ambition  which 
we  are  describing  has  been  strong  among  men,  and  the 
specimens  are  only  too  numerous.  But  the  name  carries 
us  at  once  to  medieval  associations  and  fastens  our  thoughts 
on  the  long  series  of  wonderful  men  who  for  centuries 
illuminated  human  life  with  the  intenseness  of  their  piety 
and  the  eagerness  of  their  struggle  after  personal  perfec- 
tion. Take  away  the  accidents  of  their  lives  and  leave 
only  the  essential ;  take  away  the  superstitions,  the  special 
forms  of  self-discipline ;  take  away  the  mysticism  that 
almost  always  haunted  their  theories  of  life  (though  it 
may  well  be  doubted  whether  some  form  of  mysticism  is 
not  so  necessarily  bound  up  with  the  struggle  after  the 
perfect  life  that  it  cannot  wholly  be  taken  away) ;  take 


262  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

away  its  whole  organization,  nay,  take  away  Christianity, 
remove  the  saint's  whole  special  conception  of  what  the 
goodness  is  which  he  seeks,  so  that  he  may  be  the  brother 
of  all  earnest  men  who  in  the  dimmest  or  the  brightest 
light  have  set  before  themselves,  as  the  prize  and  crown 
of  all  their  work,  the  perfect  grace  of  character — and  then 
the  medieval  saint,  in  the  essential  pnrpose  of  his  life,  rep- 
resents the  great  ambition  which  in  the  world  of  letters 
as  well  as  in  that  of  practical  labor  has  been  perhaps  the 
mightiest  that  the  human  powers  have  ever  felt  pressing 
their  subtlest  and  most  sacred  springs  and  calling  them 
to  action. 

And  there  are  points  of  view^  where  one  may  stand  to 
look  upon  this  time  of  ours — jjoints  whence  a  very  wide 
though  still  a  partial  prospect  is  commanded — where  stand- 
ing one  would  say  that  this  last  purpose  of  23ersonal  char- 
acter was  the  strongest  of  all  motives  that  animate  the 
scholarship  of  to-day.  The  single  personality  is  a  clearer 
and  more  precious  entity  than  it  has  ever  been  before. 
So  many  men  are  seeking  truth  as  if  their  very  souls  were 
hungry  for  it.  Thetj  want  it — not  the  world  has  sent 
them  to  collect  it.  But  their  hearts  are  starved  and  char- 
acter in  them  is  consciously  weak.  They  must  have  food 
and  strength.  They  go  in  various  ways  to  seek  it.  Tlie}^ 
run  to  and  fro,  and  knowledge  is  increased.  But  whether 
it  be  the  student  of  science  or  history  or  man — whether 
it  be  the  Puritan  with  his  Bible,  or  the  Ritualist  with  his 
missal,  or  the  Rationalist  with  his  lexicon — there  is  a  cer- 
tain intentness  in  the  study  of  our  time  which  seems  not 
like  the  easy  industry  of  curious  museum-makers  gather- 
ing curiosities  for  their  cabinets,  but  rather  like  the  im- 
petuous rush  of  the  starved  Hebrews  in  the  gray  morning 
after  the  divine  manna  scattered  on  the  sand,  which  was 
to  be,  in  them,  new  blood,  new  life.     Not  only  to  know 


THE  PUBPOSES   OF  SCHOLARSHIP.  263 

more  but  to  be  better  men — cJiaracfer — this  is  at  least  one 
]5urpose  of  learning  to  which  no  champion  of  its  claims 
will  deny  a  foremost  place  to-day. 

These  are  the  types,  then.  Look  back  in  history,  and 
lo !  the  scholar  has  been  all  these — prophet,  and  philoso- 
pher, and  ruler,  and  saint.  Not  ever  solely  one — always, 
in  each,  all  of  the  others  asserting  by  some  23rotest  that 
they,  too,  were  the  functions  of  the  perfect  scholar.  The 
division  by  no  means  belongs  to  scholarship  alone.  It 
would  be  interesting  to  see  how  religion  or  social  life,  for 
instance,  has  put  on  successively  these  several  aspects  and 
so  struggled  after  completeness.  Thus  it  is  that  so  many 
questions,  as  I  said,  are  akin  to  this  of  the  progress  of  the 
purposes  of  scholarship.  What  shall  we  call  these  four 
but  the  several  studies,  something  in  each  of  them  forever 
bearing  witness  that  it  is  only  a  study,  for  the  consum- 
mate scholarship  of  the  future,  which,  seeing  its  purposes 
as  clearly  as  the  sun  sees  its  western  horizon  from  the 
east,  shall  pursue  them  with  perfect  light  and  sure  success. 
Then  comes  the  great  question.  Are  we  any  nearer  that 
consummate  scholarship  which  is  to  come  out  of  the  fusion 
of  all  these  types  than  were  the  men  of  old  ?  Let  us  see. 
These  partial  purposes  of  the  scholar,  so  to  speak,  fall  into 
two  classes.  What  we  hare  called  the  Hebrew  and  the 
Roman  purposes  have  reference  to  other  men  outside  the 
scholar,  one  to  their  moral  imx)rovement,  the  other  to  their 
government.  What  we  have  called  the  Greek  and  medi- 
eval purposes  have  reference  to  the  scholar  himself,  one 
to  the  increase  of  his  learning,  the  other  to  the  perfection 
of  his  character.  Xow  scholarship  with  us  must  be  Chris- 
tian scholarship.  In  the  largest  sense,  I  mean,  it  cannot 
help  being  colored  with  the  hues  and  pointed  in  the  direc- 
tions which  Christianity  has  given  to  all  modern  life.  But 
Christianity  lives  in  two  great  ideas,  l)oth  bound  together 
in  the  one  comprehending  idea  of  the  discipleship  of  Christ. 


264  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Those  two  ideas  are  personal  perfection  and  humanity — 
culture  of  self  and  care  for  fellow-man.  "  Be  ye  perfect," 
"  Love  your  neighbor  as  yourself  " — those  are  its  two  poles. 
And  the  practical  glory  of  Christianity  is  in  the  harmony 
which  it  has  wrought  between  the  two,  so  that  instead  of 
standing  off  from  each  other  as  repugnant  alternatives 
between  which  a  man  must  choose,  they  have  come  and 
bound  themselves  inseparably  together  by  that  strongest 
claim  in  all  the  universe  which  fastens  the  effect  to  its 
cause  and  the  cause  to  its  effect,  so  that  the  disciple  of 
Christianity  finds  that  he  cannot  grow  perfect  except  by 
helping  liis  fellow-men,  and  finds  that  he  cannot  effec- 
tively help  his  feUow-men  except  out  of  the  resources  of 
an  ever-growing  goodness  in  himself. 

Now  what  if  this  most  general  influence  of  Christianity 
were  to  apply  itself,  as  time  goes  on,  for  the  harmonizing 
of  these  two  different  purposes  of  scholarship  of  which  we 
have  been  speaking,  so  that  in  the  end  they  should  seem 
to  be  but  one,  self-culture  and  human  benefit  ?  What  if 
the  progress  of  Christian  history  should  make  this  per- 
fectly clear,  which  seems  to  be  growing  clearer  now  day 
by  day,  that  no  recluse  in  his  study  can  gather  into  liim- 
self  the  best  fruits  of  his  hard  work,  and  that  no  worker 
for  the  great  human  weal  can  be  the  help  and  blessing 
which  a  weak  and  wicked  world  needs,  unless  his  force 
comes  to  it  out  of,  tJwough  a  clear  good  personality  in 
him  ?  Then  would  there  not  l^e  a  clear,  new  pui-pose  for 
the  scholar  in  the  world,  one  in  which  an  infinite  future 
of  growth  and  work  would  lie  spread  out  before  him — 
one  which  would  nobly  blend  all  the  others,  not  moral  in- 
fluence alone,  not  abstract  truth  alone,  not  force  alone,  not 
character  alone,  Imt  abstract  truth  transmuted  through, 
the  alchem}^  of  personal  character  into  moral  influence 
strong  enough  and  clear  enoiigh  to  be  ruling  force  ?  Per- 
sonal character  souoht  not  for  itself  but  to  be  the  medium 


THE  rrnrosEs  of  scnoLAEsnir.  265 

of  truth  to  others.  Truth  sought  not  for  itself  but  to  be 
transferred  through  character  into  life.  So  each  would 
be  attained  most  fully.  Above  the  cultivated  pedantry 
and  the  crude,  unintelligent  work  which  are  abundant  in 
the  world  stands  forth  to  ho})e  the  picture  of  the  scholar 
ruling  and  lifting  men  by  truth  made  forcible  through  his 
personality.  This  is  the  great  ideal.  For  where  is  force 
except  in  persons?  What  is  the  force  of  truth  except 
as  true  men  make  it  etfective  on  their  fellows?  Where 
is  the  power  of  the  abstract  ideas  which,  grasped  into  a 
mighty  personality  and  grouped  as  the  attributes  of  a 
personal  God,  make  the  universe  tremble  mth  terror  or 
bow  with  a  sob  of  love  ?  "  What  is  truth  ? ''  said  the  weary 
Roman,  too  listless  to  care  to  judge  between  the  true  and 
the  false  in  his  despair  of  the  abstract  truth.  "  I  am  the 
Truth,"  answered  the  personal  Savioiir,  and  through  His 
pei'sonality  the  truth  has  saved  the  world.  You  read 
yoiu'  volumes  of  sentiment  or  argument,  and  your  face  is 
hard ;  a  child  laughs  at  your  feet,  and  the  quick  nerves 
answer  and  the  quick  tears  come.  We  seem  to  see  men 
choosing  their  philosophies  by  the  cold,  hard  tests  of  im- 
partial reason,  and,  after  all,  as  Fichte  says  (and  he  would 
be  a  fool  who  doubted  him),  "  What  kind  of  philosoj)hy 
one  may  choose  depends  upon  what  kind  of  vuin  one  is." 
I  wonder  if  we  realize  how  the  personal  instinct,  the  in- 
stinct which  tells  us  that  the  only  true  medium  of  force 
on  men  is  in  personal  character,  is  powerful  among  us 
everywhere  in  these  especial  times.  Where  do  we  see  it  ? 
Where  do  we  not  see  it  ?  Look  at  our  literature.  Wliat 
are  our  poets  doing?  The  woods  may  bud  and  wither, 
and  the  suns  may  shine,  and  shadows  sweep  the  ocean 
and  the  plain,  nay,  masses  of  men  may  move  in  nations 
or  in  armies  as  they  will,  almost  unsung.  It  is  the  single, 
separate  man  that  the  poet  wants,  with  the  least  possible 
robe  of  circumstance  to  hide  the  figure  of  character,  or. 


266  ESSAYS  AXI)   ADDRESSES. 

if  the  robe  be  there,  it  will  be  welcomed  ouly  to  show  by 
the  dropping  of  its  folds  yet  more  of  how  the  iigaire  moves. 
So  that,  from  Wordsworth's  children  of  the  English  lanes 
down  to  Browning's  villain  husband  and  sweet,  wronged 
wife,  and  brave,  pnre-hearted  priest,  and  cabn,  clear-eyed 
Pope  of  Arezzo  and  of  Rome,  it  is  the  inner  life  of  men 
and  women  that  subtle  imagination  has  realized  to  thou- 
sands of  readers,  full  of  the  spirit  of  their  time,  and  wait- 
ing to  hear  what  their  brothers  and  sisters  are.  Nay, 
more  than  this;  what  is  that  strange,  "pathetic  fallacy," 
as  Ruskin  calls  it,  which  gives  human  feelings  to  nature 
and  makes  a  heart  of  passion  throb  under,  and  a  voice  of 
passion  speak  out  of,  the  soft  heart  of  the  roses  or  the 
angr}^  blackness  of  the  sky  ?  What  is  this  but  the  effort 
to  make  the  meanings  of  nature  strong  with  the  new  force 
of  personality  and  thrill  us  with  them  as  only  human 
voices  canf  Take  our  art,  with  all  its  common  cant. 
Our  architecture  must  have  human  "expression"  and 
"  feeling " ;  our  pictures  must  be  f idl  of  human  "  sym- 
pathy " ;  mere  sensuous  beauty  of  symmetry  and  propor- 
tion and  nature's  perfectness  gives  delight  no  more  to 
manj^  men,  or  gives  them  a  delight  of  which  they  are  half 
ashamed.  Self -consciousness  pervades  that  which  was 
once  so  unconscious,  and  shows  itself  through  all  our  so- 
cial life.  Or  take  the  novel,  the  most  characteristic  litera- 
ture of  our  time,  the  one  by  Avhich  it  will  be  most  remem- 
bered, as  it  seems  to  me.  What  is  it  all  l)ut  a  study  of 
character,  a  painting  of  men  and  women,  so  that  there 
has  gathered  out  of  rich  human  lieart  and  brains  a  com- 
pany of  characters  which  never  wore  the  flesh,  but  which 
are  so  real  to  mankind  that  they  will  live  as  memorials  of 
this  generation  of  ours  long  after  every  man  whose  feet 
really  trod  in  it,  more  certain  as  a  fact  but  less  strong  as 
a  character,  has  gone  and  is  forgotten.  Or  look  at  his- 
tory :  what  is  she  busied  in  ?     Mainly  in  reviewing  old 


THE  FUEPOSES   OF  SCROLARSHIP.  2G7 

verdicts  of  character,  seeing  whether  this  villain  was  really 
villainous  and  that  saint  was  trul}'  lioly,  shading  off  the 
sharp  blacks  and  whites  in  which  the  ages  less  critical  of 
character  painted  these  men,  with  something  of  the  same 
intense  and  almost  morbid  anah^sis  which  marks  also  our 
conscientious  scrutiny  of  ourselves  and  our  social  judg- 
ments of  one  another.  What  is  theology  doing  I  Leav- 
ing the  old  arenas  of  dogmatics,  and  fleeing  to  the  personal 
in  Christianity,  Avriting  lives  of  Jesus,  and,  fidl  of  faith 
in  personal  force,  crying  in  faith  and  affection,  '^  Ucce 
JIovio,"  as  it  holds  up  a  newly  drawn  picture  of  the  power- 
ful humanity  of  the  Son  of  God,  What  is  politics  doing  ? 
Developing  everywhere  the  principle  of  nationality,  which 
is  nothing  but  the  personality  of  the  nation,  its  caj)acity 
of  character  and  responsibilit}^  and  separate  life.  And 
then  outside  of  all — mysterious,  majestic,  certainly  real — 
there  is  the  A'ast  blind  longing  of  the  whole  human  race 
after  a  unity  within  itself,  trying  to  make  out  in  the  past 
and  to  build  for  the  future  one  vast,  colossal  manhood, 
one  in  origin,  one  in  language,  one  in  faith,  one  in  wor- 
ship, one  in  instincts,  one  in  rights,  one  in  destiny.  Where 
is  the  department  of  science,  natural  or  moral,  that  is  not 
from  its  own  side  studying  toward  this  one  man  of  univer- 
sal history,  this  colossal  personality  wdio  shall  give  expres- 
sion and  force  to  the  fact  of  human  lifef 

We  cannot  lose  sight  of  this  personal  instinct  regnant 
everywhere.  I  point  to  it  because  the  scholar  cannot  ig- 
nore it.  He  must  not  be  merely  the  student  of  charac- 
ter. He  must  bring  in  himself  such  a  character  as  shall 
transmit  truth  to  men,  and,  gathering  the  light  that  lies 
above  the  stars,  lay  it  in  clear,  soft  rays  upon  the  daily 
life  and  work  of  men  so  that  they  may  not  be  in  darkness. 
The  scholarship  of  the  world  must  be  the  atmosphere 
about  the  sun  of  truth. 

Here  all  the  functions  of  the  scholar  meet — prophet, 


268  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

philosopher,  iniler,  saint.  What  shall  we  say?  Let  him 
be  all  in  being — that  he  may  be — the  priest  of  the  x)eople. 
Behold,  another  of  those  old  words  tarnished  with  bad 
touches,  but  divine  in  its  j^ure  gold  still.  I  think  many 
and  many  such  an  old  word  is  coming  forth  in  our  day 
to  get  rid  of  old  corrnptions  and  to  fill  out  its  original 
circle  for  the  first  time  with  its  perfect  meaning.  The 
priestliness  of  the  true  scholar !  How  can  we  better  pnt 
in  one  word  all  that  we  have  said?  For  a  priest  is  he 
who  by  ^drtue  of  his  own  character  interprets  the  higher 
to  the  lower.  Character  is  the  first  essential  condition. 
Service  is  the  final  coveted  end.  In  the  scholarly  char- 
acter songht  not  for  self-indulgence  but  for  the  service  of 
mankind,  is  there  not  the  harmony  of  all  the  efforts  of 
the  ages  and  the  millennial  hojie  of  human  learning? 

We  all  feel,  I  think,  that  every  study  of  the  true  pur- 
poses of  scholarship  ought  to  lead  us  on  a  step  toward 
the  right  answer  to  be  given  to  the  problem  of  studies 
which  is  so  prominent  in  our  minds  now.  Evidentl}'  the 
purposes  of  learning  must  regulate  the  subjects  of  learn- 
ing. The  circle  of  possible  knowledge  has  widened  so  im- 
mensely, every  j^ear  sees  it  so  much  wider  still,  what  shall 
we  select  out  of  so  vast  a  range  to  be  the  proper  training 
of  our  young  men  who  aspire  to  the  best  residts  of  schol- 
arship 1  I  am  far  from  presuming  to  offer  any  thoughts 
of  mine  (with  authority)  on  such  a  question.  Only  this 
seems  clear  as  the  first  condition  of  the  whole  inquiry, 
that  any  study  which  has  benefit  to  render  to  mankind, 
and  any  study  which  shapes  and  compounds  the  character 
of  the  scholar,  to  be  the  medium  of  transmission  for  that 
benefit  may  be  the  legitimate  employment  of  the  student, 
and  that  both  must  meet  in  proportion  in  each  scholar's 
education.  It  is  the  partial  view  of  what  study  is  for  that 
impresses  us  and  disappoints  us  in  so  many  of  the  current 
one-sided  discussions  of  the  subject.     This  aspect  of  all 


THE  PURPOSES   OF  SCUOLAESHIP.  269 

learning  toivard  ))ia)iJ:iiul  is  the  central  secret  of  the  whole. 
The  true  studies  of  the  scholar  must  be  "  the  humanities  " 
iu  somethmg  more  than  an  old  technical  and  artificial 
sense.     They  must  make  men  of  men. 

Judged  thus,  we  cannot  believe  that  the  old  classical 
culture  can  be  spared  from  our  colleges  tOl  some  substi- 
tute far  more  satisfactory  than  has  yet  appeared  is  found 
to  take  its  place.  Its  "  training  of  the  mind  " — by  which 
we  all  noAV  understand  something  more  than  the  discipline 
of  the  memory  by  roots  and  conjugations — its  strange 
completeness  and  perfectness  of  life,  will  always  welcome 
the  mind  that  is  capable  of  scholarly  training,  and,  how- 
ever dead  it  may  be  to  the  mere  drudge  or  jiedant,  send 
it  out  richened  and  humanized  with  a  humanity  deeper 
than  Greek  or  Roman  ever  dreamed  of.  It  will  be  like 
the  old  stone  fonts  of  which  the  legends  tell,  that,  empty 
and  dry  to  the  profane,  filled  their  dusty  sides  with  sweet 
baptismal  Avater  by  spontaneous  miracle  when  they  felt  a 
worthy  disciple  coming  up  to  certify  faith.  And  judged 
by  this  standard,  too,  the  sciences  of  man,  of  his  mental 
and  moral  life,  these,  both  for  character  and  for  service, 
must  be  the  center  of  a  true  education,  in  spite  of  every 
positivism  that  Avould  unhumanize  om*  schools.  Nor  is  it 
easy  to  see  how,  if  the  scholar  is  to  transmit  truth  to  the 
age,  the  country,  the  town,  the  ward  in  which  his  scholar- 
ship is  to  be  an  influence,  our  schools  can  long  escape 
the  difficult  task  of  training  their  scholars  in  the  political 
principles  and  histories  which  are  forever  lying  under  our 
feet  and  l)reaking  above  ground  in  the  political  issues  of 
the  day.  And  then,  again,  so  long  as  this  be  clear,  that 
the  object  of  education  is  serviceal)le  character,  service  by 
and  through  character,  we  can  bid  the  progress  of  natural 
science  go  on  to  its  fullest.  It  would  be  strange  if  science 
did  not  grow  only  more  steady  in  its  work  of  culture  as 
it  increases  in  its  scope.     It  is  the  narrow  learning  that 


270  ESSAYS  JXI)   JDDBESSES. 

wars  with  faith  and  character,  that  separates  itself  from 
man  as  the  center  of  its  orbit.  It  is  the  short  knowledge 
that  runs  the  wildest.  You  lengthen  your  clock's  pen- 
dulum, and  it  runs  all  the  steadier  and  slower.  That  is 
the  true  principle  of  liberalism  and  conservatism  in  their 
union.  The  great  scientific  ndracles  of  usefulness  that 
belong  to  these  last  years,  the  continent  leaped  and  fettered 
by  a  railroad  and  the  ocean  fathomed  and  made  vocal 
with  a.  wire,  these  and  such  as  these  are  the  pledges  of 
the  perpetual  humanity  of  science.  Here,  too,  have  we 
not  j)ossibly  the  true  way  of  looking  at  the  practical  diffi- 
culty which  I  think  haunts  many  of  us  who  are  gathered 
here  in  the  ordinary  labors  of  our  life  ?  We  are  profes- 
sional men.  We  are  compelled  to  bind  our  work  into 
some  definite  channel  and  make  it  run  over  the  often 
weary  wheels  of  some  narrow  vocation.  We  build  no 
race  of  scholars  pure  and  simple  in  this  new  land  yet. 
We  are  a])t  to  hear  of  this  as  the  great  disadvantage 
under  which  our  scholarship  labors.  No  doubt  it  is  a 
disadvantage  so  far  as  the  depth  and  range  of  the  single 
scholar's  attainments  and  the  enlargement  of  the  absolute 
bounds  of  leai'uing  are  concerned ;  but  no  doubt,  too,  it 
has  its  advantages,  at  least  in  the  early  stages  of  a  national 
culture,  when  the  millions  are  to  be  impressed  with  the 
importance  of  knowledge  and  inspired  to  seek  it  for  them- 
selves. The  professional  life  is  to  the  scholarly  life  in 
genei-al  almost  exactly  what  the  personal  life  is  to  the 
social  life  everywhere.  A  man's  first  care  must  be  for 
himself.  Through  himself  he  finds  his  way  out  to  others, 
through  others  he  comes  back  to  himself  again  with  rich 
because  largeh^  unconscious  returns  of  benefit.  Consid- 
ered thus,  the  life  of  the  professional  man  does  seem  to 
i-ealize  in  its  idea,  as  actually  the  lives  of  the  great  pi'O- 
fessional  class  in  our  country,  I  believe,  do  realize  in 
practice,  our  notion  of  the  purposes  of  scholarship  better 


THE  PUnrOSES   OF  SCHOLABSHir.  271 

than  any  other  application  of  stndy  ever  has  or  perhaps 
for  the  present  can.  Personal  character,  and,  through  it, 
service  to  hnmanit}^ — the  priestly  scholar. 

The  dream  of  the  scholar  abont  his  own  f ntiu-e  changes, 
I  think,  as  the  years  go  on  with  him,  if  he  be  a  true  mau. 
We  can  well  believe  while  the  rose  is  but  a  bud,  shut  in 
between  hard,  glossy  green  leaves,  gathering  only  the  first 
dream  of  color  into  its  pale  petals,  that  its  own  color 
should  seem  to  it  the  purpose  of  its  life,  just  to  be  the 
perfect  rose  for  the  pure  beauty  of  its  perfeetness.  But 
when  the  bud  bursts  and  the  rose  is  born — what  then  ?  A 
world  is  waiting  for  its  fragrance  and  its  loveliness.  To 
serve  that  world,  to  send  the  colorless  light  interpreted 
through  its  soft  hues,  and  the  odorless  atmosphere  trans- 
lated by  its  fragrance,  to  be  all  that  it  may  he  for  the  sake 
of  all  that  it  may  do,  this  is  the  larger  purpose  of  its  being, 
and,  learning  this,  it  ripens  to  the  2:)erfect  flower.  So  may 
the  scholar  dream  of  imre  self-culture  for  its  own  pure 
sake.  It  is  a  noble  dream.  God's  first  gift  to  him  is 
that  self.  His  first  and  clearest  duty  is  to  that,  and  so  the 
vision  of  calm,  lofty,  separate  scholarly  repose,  who  dare 
say  that  it  is  wrong  f  But  if  the  scholar  grows  he  must 
outgrow  it.  He  must  grow  in  the  direction  of  humanity. 
All  the  vast  needs  of  life  lay  hold  on  him.  All  that  we 
have  said  points  to  the  drawing  of  the  whole  human  life 
into  one.  He  cannot  be  two  men.  cannot  live  two  lives. 
He  is  hardly  man  enough  to  live  one  well.  He  needs  his 
life  for  his  philosophy,  his  ])hilosophy  for  his  life,  both  for 
the  one  rounded  manhood.  It  is  like  the  old  story  of  the 
Iliad :  mighty  Achilles  carries  with  him  to  l)attle,  graven 
on  his  god- wrought  shield,  all  nature  and  all  life  portrayed, 
from  the  sublimest  to  the  lowest,  from  the  master-mind 
and  earth,  sky,  and  ocean  that  surrounded  all.  down  to 
the  common  scenes  of  village  life,  the  heavy  wagon  labor- 
ing along  the  rugged  road,  the  little  child  that  labored 


272  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

bringing'  home  the  scattered  ears  of  the  brown  corn  that 
overran  his  baby  arms,  the  quiet  hillside  temple  where  the 
worshipers  were  gathered,  the  sports  and  battles,  the  har- 
vests and  the  feasts,  the  marches  of  the  stars  and  the  happy 
bringing  of  the  new-made  bride,  all  the  greatness  of  heaven, 
all  the  dearness  of  earth,  went  with  him  to  the  battle  and 
stood  by  him  as  he  fought.  So  all  that  the  scholar  knows 
and  loves  must  go  out  with  him  into  all  his  life,  and  his 
scholarship  must  be  no  separate  thing,  must  be  part  of 
the  father  Avho  sits  in  the  family,  of  the  citizen  who  votes 
at  the  polls,  if  need  be  (as  need  has  been  so  lately)  of  the 
soldier  who  fights  in  the  ranks. 

And,  going  so,  his  scholarship  will  not  merely  do  good, 
it  will  get  good.  It  will  learn  to  know  always  that  out 
beyond  it  and  all  that  it  can  study  lies  forever  the  human 
heart,  with  its  instincts,  its  passions,  its  hopes,  its  infinite 
depths,  very  blind  often,  but  veiy  mighty  alwaj's,  the 
mightiest  thing  on  earth,  of  which  it  must  always  be  the 
humble  handmaid.  It  will  learn  to  count  itself  to  be  only 
like  the  boy  who  in  the  Greek  play  describes  the  omens 
to  the  blind  projihet  Teresias,  and  then  waits  meekly  till 
his  inspiration  shall  declare  their  omens.  It  will  know  its 
priesthood  and  stand  by  the  altar  of  a  higher  power.  And 
yet  for  this  its  humble  task  it  shall  labor  with  a  new-found 
faithfulness  and  enthusiasm.  It  shall  be  full  of  courage 
and  conscience,  and  out  of  their  perfect  union  shall  come 
a  clearer  and  a  clearer  insight.  And  so  the  scholar,  seek- 
ing personal  character  for  the  service  of  humanity,  shall 
grow  strong  and  successful  witli  belief  in  himself,  and  still 
more  with  lielief  in  mankind,  and  still  more  with  brave 
and  cheerful  l)elief  in  the  necessar}^  progress  of  truth,  which 
to  the  clear  and  devout  mind  means  belief  in  God. 


GRADUATION. 

(The  Gannett  School,  Boston,  Mass.,  June  27,  1871.) 

In  thinking  of  coming  here  on  Graduation  Day,  and 
knowing  that  I  was  to  say  a  few  words  to  you  at  the  close 
of  these  exercises,  from  which  we  all  expected  and  from 
which  we  have  now  received  so  much  pleasure,  I  have 
been  led  to  think  of  the  whole  idea  of  graduation,  and  of 
how  it  pervades  aU  our  life.  Let  me  try  to  siiggest  to 
you,  as  briefly  and  as  simply  as  I  can,  some  of  the  aspects 
in  wjiich  it  appears.  I  am  going  to  read  you  a  little  sober 
essay  upon  graduation,  and  it  will  not  keep  you  long. 

The  idea  of  gi-aduation  imjDhes  a  graded  life,  a  life  lived 
in  certain  stages,  which  succeed  to  one  another,  from  each 
of  which  we  climb  into  the  next.  We  ascend  a  sloping- 
path  with  more  or  less  of  struggle  and  trouble  till  we  come 
to  some  level  landing-place  where  we  rest  and  take  our 
breath.  Then  from  thence  a  new  slope,  at  another  angle 
and  set  with  a  different  verdure  of  circumstances,  leads 
us  to  another  starting-point.  There  we  And  ourselves  at 
the  foot  of  still  a  new  ascent,  and  so,  not  in  one  continu- 
ous line,  but  by  a  line  always  broken  by  places  of  rest  and 
of  new  start,  by  a  course  set  with  continual  Commence- 
ment Days,  we  advance  toward  the  highest.  We  are  con- 
stantly gi'aduating  into  some  new  life,  we  are  always  com- 
ing to  Commencement  Days.  It  is  thus  that  thoroughness 
of  work,  clearness  of  view,  continual  incitement,  and  con- 
tinual hopefulness  are  possible  to  us  even  to  the  end  of 
life. 

273 


274  ESSAYS  AND  ADDltESSES. 

It  is  curious  to  see  liow  we  give  tlie  same  accounts  even 
of  Nature,  and  make  of  her  years  and  seasons  something- 
like  the  same  series  of  graduations  whicli  we  find  in  our 
own  life.  She,  too,  does  not  seem  to  advance  in  one  con- 
tinuous ascent,  but  her  rests  and  pauses  are  a  part  of  our 
whole  conception  of  her  progress.  Each  winter  is  a  rest- 
ing-place before  every  new  spring.  Each  June  is  a  com- 
mencement season  when  the  spring-time  seems  to  graduate 
into  summer,  and  every  year  seems  to  come  to  a  platform 
of  pause  whence  its  successor  starts  out  at  a  new  angle 
to  mount  to  higher  things,  toward  the  perfect  year.  No 
doubt  it  is  partly  om*  own  view  of  her,  resulting  from  our 
own  experience.  The  oak-tree  and  the  rose,  perhaps,  have 
not  our  theory  of  spring-time.  There  is  a  A^agueness 
about  all  these  di\dding  lines,  but  neither  have  the  stages 
of  our  human  lives  perfectly  clear  divisions.  They  shade 
off  into  one  another,  and  so  Nature's  picture  is  not  untrue 
to  the  human  careers  it  seems  to  represent. 

If  we  go  further  and  ask  what  is  the  character  of  these 
successive  graduations  of  which  our  progress  seems  to  be 
made  up,  it  must  be  answered,  I  suppose,  that  it  is  always 
from  some  school  condition,  some  state  of  pupilage  into 
the  scholarship  of  some  higher  school,  or  else  into  the 
more  directly  personal  responsibility  of  some  freer  life. 
This  makes  the  leaAdng  school,  in  which  some  of  you, 
young  ladies,  are  rejoicing — perhaps  over  whicli  also  you 
are  a  little  sad  to-day — a  fitting  time  to  try  to  point  out 
some  of  the  other  schools  that  you  will  have  to  leave  in 
life,  some  of  the  future  graduations  that  you  will  have  to 
make,  some  of  the  stages  of  the  progress  of  whicli  this  is 
one,  and  of  which  altogether  your  whole  life,  if  it  is  to  be 
kept  fresh  and  live,  must  be  made  up. 

This  is  what  I  shall  try  to  do. 

You  are  graduating  to-day  in  general  from  the  acqui- 
sition of  knowledge  into  the  use  of  knowledge.     The  line 


GRADUATIOX.  It-^ 

is  shadowy  and  vague.  You  have  not  done  acquii'ing 
and  you  have  ah-eady  begun  to  use,  but  that  is  the  way 
in  general  in  which  it  may  be  described.  Let  me  say 
one  word  more  of  introduction.  This  graduation  is  far 
more  evident  and  prominent  in  some  hves  than  in  others. 
There  are,  indeed,  some  lives  in  which  it  never  seems  to 
come.  There  are  some  shy  natures,  very  deeply  and  very 
constantly  cognizant  of  how  much  there  is  in  the  world 
to  leai'n,  to  whom  the  time  for  using  knowledge  never 
seems  to  come.  Some  of  the  noblest,  sweetest,  and  most 
interesting  people  I  have  known  seem  never  to  think  of 
anything  but  of  going  on  collecting  all  their  Hves.  They 
are  unpractical  people,  as  the  world  labels  them.  They 
never  seem  to  have  got  material  together  enough  to  build. 
They  are  in  school  all  their  lives.  They  never  seem  to 
put  their  hands  to  any  work  without  being  so  unpressed 
with  the  immensity  of  even  the  smallest  work  that  they 
think  themselves  unready,  and  so  they  are  not  only  learn- 
ers all  their  days,  as  all  must  be,  but  they  are  nothing  hut 
learners  all  their  days.  They  live  a  life  like  that  which 
God  made  David  live  when  he  only  let  him  gather  the 
stones  and  timber  for  the  futui'e  temple  and  then  die  and 
leave  the  temple  for  Solomon  to  build.  When  they  die 
men  call  their  histories  failures,  but  who  can  say  f  There 
certainl}^  is  a  fine  conscientiousness  and  unworldhness  and 
purity  about  them.  They  are  continually  inciting  more 
superficial  folk  to  thoroughness.  Perhaps  thej^  do  build 
without  knowing  it,  and  who  can  tell  what  beautiful 
structures  their  long  preparation  builds  in  some  other 
life  that  follows  this,  for  we  are  always  forgetting  that 
all  the  lives  are  one. 

We  will  not  call  them  failures ;  but,  not  presuming  to 
judge  of  them,  we  may  still  point  at  the  stages  of  the 
progress  which  most  of  us  ought  to  make  as  we  at  least 
draw  out  the  scheme  and  program  of  a  full  and  rounded  life. 


276  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

And  first  there  is  this  graduation,  from  the  gathering 
of  knowledge  into  clear  opinions.  The  accumulation  of 
knowledge  is  the  school-room's  work.  The  shaping  of 
clear  opinions  is  the  work  of  life,  and  it  is  wonderfvd  how 
many  learners  stop  at  the  school-room's  door  and  never 
get  beyond  its  pleasant  flower-twined  gateway  all  their 
lives.  Opinions  are  good  for  nothing  unless  they  are 
built  out  of  good  materials.  These  materials  are  what 
you  get  from  books,  and  history,  and  newsj^ajDers,  and 
nature,  and  society.  They  are  what  you  have  been  gath- 
ering and  learning  how  to  gather  here.  But  so  many 
people  think  they  have  got  thoughts  when  they  have  only 
got  knowledge.  You  cannot  build  the  house  without  the 
stone  and  lumber,  but  then  the  stone  and  lumber,  unbuilt, 
lying  loose  or  piled  upon  the  ground,  are  not  the  house. 
I  can  show  you  what  I  mean.  Here  is  this  war  between 
France  and  Germany,  which  has  been  waging  this  past 
year :  ever  so  many  people  know  its  great  facts,  when  it 
began,  how  the  armies  met,  the  first  defeat  of  the  great 
nation,  the  quick  prostration  of  what  seemed  the  mighty 
army,  the  emperor's  surrender,  the  slow  majestic  progress 
of  the  Germans,  the  siege  of  Paris,  and  then  the  di'eadful 
horrors  of  the  civil  war.  Men  and  women  talk  about 
them  in  their  parlors.  But  the  most  striking  thing  about 
it,  as  one  sits  in  the  parlor  and  listens  to  their  talk,  is  how 
much  the  men  and  women  know  about  it  all  and  how 
little  they  think  about  it  all,  how  many  facts  they  have 
learned,  how  few  opinions  they  have,  how  little  of  rational 
notion,  notion  with  any  grounds  for  it,  they  have  acquired 
of  why  it  all  l)egan,  and  why  it  went  on  and  came  out  as 
it  did,  and  what  is  to  come  next. 

I  am  not  urging  you,  when  I  beg  you  not  to  be  satisfied 
with  mere  facts  Imt  to  try  and  graduate  into  opinions — I 
am  not  urging  you  to  fill  your  brains  with  mere  ground- 
less prejudices  and  fancies.     Those  are  almost  worse  than 


GEADUATIOX.  277 

no  attempt  at  thought  at  all.  Plenty  of  people  have  been 
calling  themselves  "  French/'  or  calling  themselves  "  Ger- 
mans," all  the  winter,  and  the  only  difference  between 
them  is  the  way  they  spell  the  names  of  their  pet  parties. 
Prejudices  are  good  for  nothing,  because  they  are  one- 
sided things.  The  very  privilege  and  beauty  of  opinions 
based  on  knowledge,  of  such  opinions  as  it  is  in  the  power 
of  the  gi-aduates  of  a  school  Hke  this  to  form,  is  that  they 
may  be  many-sided  and  symmetrical.  It  is  strange  what 
a  230wer  belongs  to  any  thought,  even  though  not  the 
wisest,  that  at  least  appears  to  see  both  sides.  Have  you 
ever  tried  to  draw  any  chance  medley'  of  lines  on  paper 
and  then  fold  it  over  and  produce  adjoining  it  just  its 
complement,  the  same  lines  reversed?  You  cannot  draw 
any  figure  so  grotesque  that,  thus  repeated,  finished  with 
its  other  side,  it  will  not  be  symmetrical  and  probably 
pleasing,  perhaps  even  beautiful. 

I  beheve  it  is  no  uncommon,  certainly  it  is  a  very  fit- 
ting, subject  to  choose  for  an  occasion  such  as  this  to 
speak  of  what  men  sometimes  call  the  little,  but  what  is 
the  very  great,  importance  of  good  manners.  I  have  seen 
a  commencement  address  full  of  wise  and  pure  and  useful 
suggestions  on  this  subject,  that  was  read,  I  think,  before 
this  very  school ;  but  if  I  chose  that  subject,  one  of  the 
things  that  I  would  insist  on  most  would  be  the  dignity 
and  gi'ace  and  solidity  of  manners  that  could  not  come 
except  from  tlionghtfidness.  I  think  you  can  tell  from  the 
way  in  which  a  man  or  woman  greets  you  on  the  street 
or  in  a  room  whether  you  are  meeting  one  who  is  in  the 
habit  of  thought,  one  who  has  opinions.  It  gives  a  quiet 
power  that  no  culture  of  conventionality  can  counterfeit. 
It  fills  conversation  so  full  at  once  that  commonplace  is 
drowned  and  gi'cat  topics  can  float  easily  and  without 
effort.  The  unthoughtful  person's  talk  is  always  gossip, 
which  is  always  vulgar,  even  if  it  deals  with  wars  and 


278  JlSSAYS  axd  abdeesses. 

revoliitions.  The  tlioiiglitfiil  person's  talk  is  philosophical 
and  interesting  and  elegant,  even  if  it  is  abont  neighbors 
and  servants.  Wit  and  wisdom  are  not  in  subjects  but  in 
speakers. 

I  am  not  auxions  to  try,  and  I  do  not  think  I  should 
succeed  if  I  did  try,  to  tell  you  how  this  graduation  from 
knowledge  into  thought  is  to  be  made,  how  people  must 
think.  I  believe  our  schools  now  try  to  teach  their  schol- 
ars to  think.  That  is  well.  That  is  a  great  advance 
on  the  schools  of  other  days,  but  I  suppose  it  cannot  be 
taught  in  any  school  to  any  great  extent.  It  lies  beyond 
school-life.  It  must  come  to  each  differently,  and  to  each 
out  of  some  personal  experiences.  But  the  first  thing 
must  be  to  feel  its  need  and  to  be  dissatisfied  without  it ; 
then  to  any  person  with  the  ordinary  powers  of  thought 
it  will  be  sure  to  come.  And  so  this  is  the  first  gradua- 
tion which  I  set  before  you,  to  be  desu-ed  earnestly  and 
slowly  reached — the  graduation  out  of  mere  knowledge 
into  thoughts  and  opinions.  It  is  the  first  fresh,  bright, 
joyous  breaking  of  the  buried  seed  out  of  the  cold  ground 
of  school  into  the  sunlight  of  life. 

Another  graduation  which  every  full,  eager-minded 
student  asks  for  at  the  school-room  door  which  has  just 
been  opened  is  into  freer  action.  '  *  What  shall  I  do  with 
this  knowledge  which  I  have  been  acquiring?  It  surely 
was  not  given  me  merely  to  make  opinion  of.  What  can 
I  do  with  it?  Action  is  more  than  thought.  It  is  the 
fruit  of  which  thought  is  only  the  promising  bud."  And 
so  it  is.  But  I  think  that  our  whole  notion  of  what  we 
can  do  with  learning  needs  to  be  enlarged.  I  think  that 
the  whole  idea  which  a  great  many  learners  have  of  what 
use  they  can  make  of  the  facts  of  history  and  natural 
science  which  they  have  been  gathering  is  that  if  need 
comes  they  can  teach  them  to  others.  They  can  keep 
school  themselves.     But  if  that  is  all,  surely,  then,  things 


GRADUATION.  279 

have  but  a  very  artificial  value,  and  perhaps  it  is  not 
necessary,  after  aU,  that  they  should  be  taught  at  aU. 
The  school  does  not  exist  for  the  teacher's  sake,  but  for 
the  scholar's.  There  must  be  another  use.  There  is — a 
more  true  and  real  one.  It  comes  as  the  next  graduation 
after  that  which  has  carried  us  from  knowledge  into 
thought.  When  you  begin  to  think  carefully  about  the 
things  that  you  have  learned,  you  will  find  it  very  beauti- 
ful to  discover  how  all  these  facts  have  got  principles  or 
laws  in  them,  like  the  meat  in  the  nut,  and  how  you  may 
get  the  princijile  out  and  use  it  in  some  miniature  need 
of  your  life,  which  answers  exactly  to  the  great  need  of 
the  world's  life  in  which  you  have  seen  it  used  upon  the 
pages  of  your  history.  I  call  it  beautiful,  and  no  beauty 
can  be  more  fascinating  to  the  active  and  the  intelligent 
mind.  You  may  be  more  prudent  to  govern  your  little 
world  by  the  study  of  the  wise  or  foolish  governments  of 
history.  You  may  copy  the  steadfastness  of  Washington 
and  shun  the  vices  of  the  rebellion  in  your  own  homes. 
You  may  make  youi*  little  world  more  beautiful  by  bring- 
ing it  into  a  more  intelligent  harmony  with  the  great 
worlds  of  nature  and  of  art  of  which  you  have  learned 
at  school.  The  Alps  and  the  Parthenon  may  make  your 
homes  more  noble  and  more  beautiful.  To  take  the  uni- 
versal rain  and  sunshine  in  and  send  it  out  again  in  its 
own  private  violet  or  corn-stalk,  that  is  the  activity  of  the 
little  brown  industrious  clod.  Again,  I  do  not  try  to  tell 
you  just  how  to  do  it,  but  keep  before  you  the  clear  idea 
of  what  you  want  to  do,  and  be  constantly  determined  to 
do  it,  and  it  must  be  done.  The  result  will  come  in  a 
brave,  patient,  fruitful,  active  life. 

Then  I  want  to  speak  of  one  more  graduation,  namely, 
that  by  which  one  grows  to  true  and  earnest  feelmg„  I 
put  this  last,  because  the  feeling  properly  comes  after 
thought  and  action,  as  the  result  of  knowledge.     There 


280  ASSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

are,  indeed,  strong  feelings  that  come  long  before,  but 
they  are  apt  to  be  mere  sentiments,  mere  sentimentalities ; 
but  when  one  has  known  much,  and  thought  much,  and 
done  much  duty,  then  come  those  large,  deep  enthusiasms, 
whose  warmth  is  the  very  vital  heat  of  a  large  living 
character,  the  enthusiasms  which  give  us  warmth  in  all 
the  coldness,  and  light  in  all  the  darkness  of  the  world  we 
have  to  walk  through — the  rich,  ripe  fruit  of  life. 

It  happens  to  some  people — it  may  happen  to  some  of 
you — through  some  blunder  of  life,  or  through  some  fault 
of  temperament,  to  have  to  go  through  life  thinking  ear- 
nestly and  working  faithfully,  and  yet  never  coming  out 
into  the  delight  of  warm  and  hearty  feeling.  The  thought 
and  work  may  still  be  duties,  however  dreary,  they  may 
have  to  be  done,  however  coldly;  but  if  they  never  go 
beyond  themselves,  they  will  always  be  cold  and  imper- 
fect. There  is  no  day  more  bright  in  all  one's  life  than 
that  in  which  one  becomes  conscious  of  this  final  gradua- 
tion, I  call  it  a  "  day,"  as  if  it  came  suddenly.  The  truth 
is,  it  comes  very  gradually.  It  begins  to  come  with  the 
first  truth  we  learn,  and  it  never  is  completely  reached, 
because  its  range  is  infinite ;  but  very  often  there  is  a 
certain  point  where  we  become  conscious  that  it  has  been 
attained ;  when,  having  learned  facts  and  having  judged 
of  their  relations  to  each  other,  and  having  put  their  prin- 
ciples to  use  in  daily  life,  we  find  our  hearts  as  well  as 
our  minds  and  oui'  hands  dealing  with  them,  we  find  their 
characters  and  qualities  reacting  on  our  deepest  feelings 
so  that  we  glow  with  affection  or  fire  with  indignation  as 
we  think  about  them ;  when,  out  of  all  our  learning  and 
thinking  and  acting,  we  begin  to  find  ourselves  at  all 
''  dowered  with  the  hate  of  hate,  the  scorn  of  scorn,  the 
love  of  love,"  as  Tennyson  so  nobly  puts  it.  Then  life 
puts  on  its  complete  grace,  then  it  is  a  great  joy  to  live. 

Our  affections  and  our  indignations  are  the  deepest  part 


GJiAD  UA  TION.  281 

of  US.  They  lie,  indeed,  all  throngh  our  nature.  They 
cleave  right  through  from  the  surface  to  the  core.  We 
begin  by  using  them  upon  the  sui'face.  We  begin  by 
thinking  a  trick  of  dress  lovely,  and  a  mere  habit  of  awk- 
ward movement  hateful.  That  is  the  mere  plajdng  of 
the  great  faculties  of  love  and  hate.  By  and  by  they  go 
deeper.  Wlien  they  have  got  down  to  their  deepest  and 
are  loving  all  that  is  pure  and  good  and  true  and  are 
hating  what  is  mean  and  false  and  cruel,  then  their  inten- 
sity comes  out,  then  they  ennoble  and  delight  and  inspire 
our  life,  then  they  become  charitable  and  generous  and 
give  us  charity  and  independence ;  then  in  their  fullest 
use  our  human  nature  seems  a  glorious  tiling.  When 
they  get  to  their  deepest,  and  love  Clod  and  hate  all  that 
dishonors  Him,  then  they  have  become  rehgious,  then  the 
highest  of  all  glories  is  reached,  and  heaven  has  nothing 
to  offer  except  higher  rooms  of  this  highest  school  into 
which  the  soul  has  graduated  now. 

We  ought  to  press  forward  to  this  highest  graduation, 
to  seek  the  noblest  feelings  and  enthusiasms.  Again,  I 
cannot  tell  you  how  to  win  them,  but  to  the  soul  that 
does  not  shut  them  out  by  frivolity  or  bitterness,  they 
nmst  come  in,  for  they  are  aU  around  us,  and  when  they 
come  in  to  us  then  our  life  is  very  rich. 

I  have  not  known  how  else  to  come  before  you  on  j^our 
graduation  day  than  with  some  such  attempt  to  show  jow 
what  there  is  in  life  before  you.  You  hear  people  talli: 
about  being  tired  with  life,  of  finding  it  so  long  and  so 
monotonous.  You  have  not  begun  to  think  of  such  things 
yet,  but  if  you  ever  do  it  will  be  because  jou  have  lost 
sight  of  the  endless  growth  which  is  the  only  life.  I  do 
not  wonder  that  people  find  life  dull  who  never  think  or 
work  or  feel,  who  stop  short  in  the  little  they  have  learned 
and  let  it  grow  tame  to  them  in  their  daily  drudgeiy  with 
it.    But  always  to  let  our  minds  play  upon  what  we  know. 


282  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

and  so  always  to  be  getting  more  use  out  of  it ;  always  to 
keep  it  close  up,on  onr  hearts,  and  so  to  keep  it  always 
warm — this  makes  the  world  seem  very  rich  and  beautiful 
and  fresh,  as  God  meant  that  it  should  be,  as  it  is  to  you 
to-day,  as  I  pray  that  it  may  always  be,  as  there  is  no 
reason  why  it  should  not  always  be. 

It  is  this  constant  graduation  that  makes  all  the  little 
things  of  life,  manners,  dress,  conversation,  household  life, 
sweet,  pure,  and  satisfying,  full  of  deep  and  endless  fas- 
cination. 

This  constant  graduation  finds  its  highest  type  in  the 
sincere  and  joyous  dedication  wMch  we  make  of  ourselves 
away  from  every  selfishness  into  the  thoughtful  and  active 
and  loving  service  of  our  JMaster,  Jesus  Christ. 

It  is  completed  in  that  final  change  when  the  school- 
doors  of  the  world  open  at  last,  and  the  child  goes  home 
to  live  in  tlie  Heavenly  Father's  house  forever. 

This  is  my  essay  upon  graduations.  I  thank  you  for 
listening  to  my  words,  which  I  hope  you  have  not  thought 
too  many  or  too  sober  for  your  festival  day,  and  I  pray 
God  to  bless  you  with  every  best  blessing  through  long 
and  very  happy  lives. 


ADDRESS  AT   THE   DEDICATION   OF   THE 

MEMORIAL   HALL,  AXDOVER,  MASS., 

MAY  80,  1873. 

The  employment  to  which  this  Decoration  Day  is  dedi- 
cated, and  in  which  many  of  yon  have  been  occnpied  this 
morning,  is  the  noblest  in  which  a  free  and  gratefnl  people 
can  engage.  The  graves  of  the  soldiers  all  over  the  land 
have  once  more  burst  into  flower  with  the  honor  and  affec- 
tion of  devoted  hearts.  Once  more  the  stately  obelisks 
and  the  little  hillocks  that  are  fast  sinking  back  to  the 
common  level  of  the  mother  earth  have  become  the  flower- 
decked  monnments  of  the  truths  and  principles  for  which 
they  died  whose  bodies  lie  below  them.  It  is  not  the  least 
of  the  debts  that  we  owe  to  our  Union  soldiers  that  their 
very  graves  are  vocal — that  though  dead  they  speak  to 
us  still.  The  soldiers  who  sur\ived  the  war  have  passed 
into  other  occupations.  It  is  the  lives  that  stopped  at 
loj' alty  and  freedom  that  have  left  the  strongest  emphasis 
upon  those  sacred  words.  The  men  who  from  the  bloody 
shore  of  the  Rebellion  embarked  into  the  other  life  have 
left  their  footprints  ineffaceable  upon  the  margin  where 
they  planted  them,  and  made  it  recognizable  and  dear 
forever. 

The  voluntary  and  continual  commemoration  of  the 
soldiers  who  died  in  the  war  shows  how  entirely  their 
lives  and  deaths  belonged  to  the  very  substance  of  their 
land's  history.  Your  friend  dies  by  an  accident,  and  you 
remember  him  and  decorate  his  grave,  but  the  country 

283 


284  ESSATS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

does  not  come,  year  after  year,  to  honor  him  with  flowers. 
Or,  if  his  character  was  so  sublime  and  singular  that  all 
men  gather  at  his  tomb,  that  honor  cannot  be  perpetual. 
Other  men  come  who  never  knew  him,  and  by  and  by  his 
grave  is  left  undecked,  to  sink  back  into  the  level  sod. 
It  is  the  Covenanters'  tombstones  to  which  Old  Mortality 
does  his  pious  duty.  It  is  the  soldiers  of  freedom  and  the 
Union  on  whose  graves  the  freemen  of  the  Union  strew 
their  memorial  tributes.  The  friends  -who  knew  them 
may  all  pass  away.  The  mere  enthusiasm  of  the  great 
victory  grows  calm.  The  excited  party  feehng  all  evapo- 
rates. The  sectional  dislike  is  all  forgotten.  But  so  long 
as  the  character  of  the  people  remains  unchanged,  those 
graves  must  still  be  monuments.  It  is  because  in  them, 
in  what  they  were  and  what  they  did,  tlie  best  of  our 
national  character  shone  out,  that  these  soldiers  have  won 
a  dearness  and  a  permanent  memory  that  do  not  belong 
merely  to  their  personality.  The  nation  honors  in  them 
its  trnest  representatives.  The  real  life  of  the  land  sees 
in  them  the  ideal  life  which  is  the  true  outcome  of  its  in- 
stitutions. They  were  the  flower  of  its  principles,  and  so 
it  sprinkles  its  memorial  flowers  on  their  graves. 

I  have  been  led  to  these  thoughts  as  I  have  considered 
the  somewhat  double  purpose  of  the  building  for  whose 
dedication  we  have  come  together  here  to-da^^  We  are 
going  to  set  apart  forever  a  Hall  which  shall  be  a  Memo- 
rial Hall  of  the  soldiers  of  Andover  who  died  for  tlieir 
country,  and  also  a  means  of  culture  and  education  for 
the  town  to  which  they  belonged.  The  Hall  is  to  be  con- 
secrated at  once  to  their  memory  and  to  the  town's  best 
uses.  It  is  to  be  a  Memorial  Hall  and  a  Library  Hall  at 
once.  And  surely  that  is  good.  If  these  Andover  soldiers 
were  indeed  the  best  fruits  of  our  institutions,  the  best 
specimens  of  our  character,  then  all  that  can  educate  that 
character  is  the  best  memorial  of  them.     If  nobleness  of 


BEBICATIOX  OF  TEE  MEMOBIAL   HALL.  285 

thought,  intelligent  devotion  to  then*  country,  chivah'ous 
emulation  of  the  knightly  lives  of  other  days  burned  in 
those  young  men's  bosoms,  then  let  us  feel  that  we  honor 
their  memory  by  every  effort  to  keep  alight  these  sacred 
fires  in  the  breasts  of  others  who  are  to  live  where  they 
lived,  and  in  peace,  if  not  in  war,  are  to  be  called  to  duties 
no  less  honorable,  though  less  conspicuous  than  theirs. 

We  are  to  consecrate  to  the  memory  of  the  Union  sol- 
diers a  Library  Hall.  Is  there  any  unfitness  there  ?  At 
the  foot  of  the  tablet  that  records  their  names,  quiet  stu- 
dents wiU  bend  over  the  pages  of  peaceful  books.  But 
we  learned  something  about  all  that  during  the  war.  We 
learned  that  even  the  culture  of  books,  if  it  were  true  and 
healthy,  made  men  fit  for  the  only  sort  of  soldiership  we 
want — the  soldiership  for  principles  and  truth.  Our  col- 
lege students  flocked  out  to  the  war.  This  hiU  of  study 
sent  its  students  to  the  field.  In  the  old  days,  the  poet 
^schylus  fought  for  his  country's  deliverance  at  Mara- 
thon. Sir  PhiHp  Sidney,  the  chevalier  alike  of  books  and 
arms,  died  his  heroic  death  under  the  walls  of  Dutch  Zut- 
pheu,  for  whose  relief  from  the  Spaniard  he  Avas  magnan- 
imously straggling.  In  these  last  days  the  German  uni- 
versities have  poured  their  students  and  professors  into 
the  field  for  fatherland.  Everywhere,  always,  good  culture 
and  the  championship  of  principles  belong  together ;  and 
so  to  the  education  of  the  people  we  may  weU  consecrate 
this  memorial  of  the  people's  representative  soldiers. 

It  is  not  for  me  now  to  give  in  much  detail  the  history 
of  this  Memorial  Hall.  It  is  the  town's  gift  to  itself,  in 
memory  of  its  soldiers,  and  in  the  desire  of  perpetuating 
as  well  as  commemorating  their  patriotism  and  virtue. 
Nor  does  it  take  from  its  public  character  that  it  is  prin- 
cipally due  to  the  munificence  of  one  Andover  man  that 
the  Hall  stands  complete  in  Andover  to-day.  If  a  stranger 
had  built  it  for  the  town,  it  would  have  been  far  different. 


286  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

But  it  was  to  a  fellow-citizen  of  yours,  my  friends,  to  one 
whose  cliaracter  and  history  you  rejoice  to  identify  with 
your  institutions,  to  one  whose  long  life  here  has  enriched 
your  community  even  more  by  his  personal  influence  than 
by  his  enterprise  and  the  liberal  bestowal  of  his  wealth, 
it  was  to  him,  who,  though  not  born  here,  has  united  his 
life  closely  with  yours  for  many  useful  years,  it  was  to 
him  that  the  good  idea  first  suggested  itself,  in  foreign 
lands,  the  fruit  of  which  we  see  complete  to-day.  I  am 
sure  that  this  must  be  a  day  of  profound  satisfaction  to 
Mr.  John  Smith,  whose  liberal  heart  fii'st  devised  the  lib- 
eral thing  which  has  now  come  to  its  consummation.  I 
am  sure  that  the  town's  gratitude  to  him  is  only  the  rati- 
fication, as  it  were,  of  his  own  pleasm'e  in  this  good  work 
done.  A  life  of  honest,  manly  toil,  of  wide  and  thought- 
ful liberality,  of  true  devotion  to  religion  and  the  good  of 
man,  nmst  find,  although  it  does  not  seek  and  even  would 
disclaim,  its  own  monument  in  the  monument  it  rears  to 
others.  To  him,  and  to  those  others,  closely  united  to  him 
in  blood  and  business,  who  led  the  town  in  this  good  enter- 
prise, this  honor  must  be  given,  that  there  was  in  them 
the  character  which  could  appreciate  the  character  of  the 
men  who  fought  our  battles.  It  is  an  honor  to  desu-e  to 
honor  the  truly  great ;  and  no  man  must  stand  here  and 
be  your  orator  to-day  without  acknowledging  in  the  town's 
behalf  the  town's  indebtedness  to  him  whose  patriotic 
heart  conceived,  and  whose  liberal  hand  has  executed,  this 
memorial  to  those  whom  we  delight  to  honor.  Long  may 
he  live  to  see  its  usefulness ;  long  and  happily  may  the 
gratitude  of  his  toAvnsmen  surround  his  life ;  and  years 
after  we  all  are  gone,  may  this  Hall  stand  as  a  memorial 
not  merely  that  there  were  Andover  men  who  gave  them- 
selves for  their  country  when  she  needed  them,  but  that 
there  were  other  Andover  men  who  had  it  in  their  hearts 
to  appreciate  and  honor  that  glorious  devotion. 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  MEMORIAL   HALL.  287 

I  suppose  that  we  all  belong;  to  Andover  and  are  proud 
of  her  to-day.  We  feel  this  day  to  be,  in  some  sense,  the 
consummate  day  of  all  her  life.  We  want  to  talk  of  her 
together.  We  want  to  trace  through  all  her  history  that 
union  of  active  patriotism  with  the  desire  for  educated 
character  which  is  set  forth  in  the  double  pnrposes  of  this 
occasion.  Let  us  try  to  do  this.  The  more  we  look  into 
the  history  of  Andover  the  more  we  feel  how  thoroughly 
it  is  a  characteristic  New  England  town.  If  I  wanted  to 
give  a  foreigner  some  clear  idea  of  what  that  excellent 
institution,  a  New  England  town,  really  is,  in  its  history 
and  its  character,  in  its  enterprise  and  its  sobriety,  in  its 
godliness  and  its  manliness,  I  should  be  sure  that  I  could 
do  it  if  I  could  make  him  perfectly  familiar  with  the  past 
and  the  present  of  Andover.  From  the  time  when  the 
first  settlei's  came  from  Newtown,  in  1634,  and  built  their 
fii'st  cabins  at  Cochichewick,  where  the  brook  still  falls 
from  the  Great  Pond  into  the  Merrimac,  when  Mr.  Wood- 
bridge  bought  the  land  of  Cutshamache,  the  Sagamore, 
for  six  pounds  and  a  coat,  from  that  day  down  to  this, 
when  Andover  adds  another  to  the  memorials  of  the  sol- 
diers that  are  springing  up  all  over  the  land,  there  has  not 
been  one  experience  of  New  England  in  which  she  has 
not  borne  her  part,  or  one  good  characteristic  of  New 
England  which  she  has  not  illustrated  at  its  best.  Her 
settlers  hved  here  in  the  wilderness.  Their  infant  town 
was  attacked  by  the  Indians.  Their  meeting-house  was 
burned,  their  cattle  stolen,  and  their  people  killed.  They 
built  their  blockhouses  on  the  banks  of  the  Merrimac  and 
in  the  fields  of  the  Shawshin.  Andover  caught  the  fanat- 
icism which  burst  out  on  the  darker  side  of  the  religion 
of  the  land,  and  three  of  the  people  of  Andover  were  hung 
or  pressed  to  death  for  witchcraft.  It  developed  under 
the  hard  and  healthy  ecclesiastical  S3^stem,  and  learned 
the  severe  but  vigorous  theology  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 


288  ESSAYS  AND   ADBEESSES. 

tury.  It  shared  in  the  religious  movements  of  later  times. 
It  met  the  first  need  and  the  first  difficulties  of  popular 
education.  In  1701  it  built  its  first  school-honse  "at  the 
parting  of  the  ways  by  Joseph  Wilson's."  It  had  all  the 
culture  of  the  town-meeting  and  the  training-field.  It 
had  its  typical  ministers  and  esquires.  It  was  heart  and 
soul  in  the  War  of  Independence.  It  caught  the  new  im- 
pulse of  manufactures,  which  has  altered  New  England 
in  this  last  century.  It  opened  its  gates  to  the  tide  of 
foreign  immigration.  It  has  felt  all  the  great  moral  move- 
ments— the  temperance  movement,  the  antislavery  move- 
ment— which  have  had  so  much  to  do  mth  the  education 
of  New  England ;  and  in  these  later  years  it  has  felt  the 
stir  of  outraged  loyalty,  and  was  not  wanting  when  the 
Republic  called  upon  her  sons  to  conquer  the  rebellion 
that  assailed  her  life.  Everj'where  the  true  New  England 
town !  And  where  in  all  the  countries  through  which 
one  roams  does  he  find  any  better  or  healthier  type  of  life 
or  society?  A  healthy  soberness  pervades  its  thought 
and  action.  Its  men  and  women  live  out  long  lives  full 
of  calm,  useful  days.  Full  many  here  have  rounded  their 
complete  century.  It  is  a  solid  granite  base  of  character 
for  any  history  to  build  upon. 

Nor  can  one  know  the  old  town  well  and  not  feel  how 
even  its  scenery  has  the  same  typical  sort  of  value  which 
belongs  to  all  its  life.  All  that  is  most  characteristic  in 
our  New  England  landscape  finds  its  representation  here. 
Its  rugged  granite  breaks  with  hard  lines  through  the 
stubborn  soil.  Its  sweep  of  hill  and  valley  fills  the  eye 
with  various  beaut3\  Its  lakes  catch  the  sunlight  npon 
generous  bosoms.  Its  rivers  are  New  England  rivres, 
ready  for  work,  and  yet  not  destitute  of  beauty.  If  every- 
where our  New  England  scenery  suggests  to  the  imagina- 
tion that  is  sensitive  to  such  impressions  some  true  resem- 
blance to  the  nature  of  the  people  who  grow  up  among 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  MEilOBIAL   HALL.  2S9 

its  i^ictures,  nowhere  are  such  siig-gestions  clearer  than  in 
this  town,  which  is  so  thoroughly  part  and  parcel  of  New 
England.  Her  sons  have  carried  out  her  pictures  in  their 
memory,  and  in  the  camps  of  Virginia  and  on  the  shores 
of  the  great  Gulf  their  native  courage  has  been  kindled 
to  new  life  by  the  remembrance  of  the  hills  and  pastm-es 
of  their  native  town. 

A  town  with  such  a  character  must  be  intelligently  in- 
terested in  every  critical  period  of  the  country's  histoiy, 
and  so  our  town  has  been.  Let  us  look  for  a  moment  at 
the  Andover  of  the  Revolution.  It  will  be  good  to  see 
that  the  men  to  whom  we  dedicate  our  memorial  to-day 
are  the  true  sons  of  the  patriots  of  1776.  As  we  read  the 
history  of  the  good  town  in  the  last  century,  it  seems  in- 
deed as  if  we  read,  on  yellowed  paper  and  in  old-fashioned 
type,  the  perfectly  familiar  story  of  ten  years  ago.  Sup- 
pose youi'self  an  Andover  stripling,  wide-awake  and  inter- 
ested in  all  that  was  going  on,  clad  in  your  prim  child's 
square-cut  coat  and  small-clothes,  one  hundred  years  ago 
— what  would  you  have  seen  and  heard  ?  Here  it  is  De- 
cember, 1774.  The  town  is  meeting.  The  boys  are  liang- 
ing  round  the  door  and  telling  one  another  how  it  has  just 
been  voted  that  one  quarter  part  of  all  the  training  sol- 
diers should  enlist.  You  are  wishing  that  you  were  old 
enough  to  carry  a  gun.  You  are  drilling  with  staves  and 
wooden  swords  in  mimic  muster  with  the  other  boys  along 
the  road.  Next  April  comes,  and  two  companies  under 
Captain  Farnum  and  Captain  Ames,  with  Colonel  Frye  to 
lead  them,  have  goup  down  to  Cambridge.  In  June  the 
battle  comes  at  Bunker's  Hill,  and  the  Andover  company 
has  had  its  fifty  men  engaged.  The  news  comes  up  to 
Andover.  Three  of  our  men  are  killed  and  seven  wounded. 
It  is  the  Lord's  day,  but  the  meeting-house  is  closed.  You 
have  seen  Parson  French  with  gun  and  surgical  instru- 
ments start  off  in  a  hurry  for  the  little  army.     Long  since 


290  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

the  town  has  voted  that  no  person  shall  vend  tea  of  for- 
eign importation.  They  liave  appointed  their  committee 
to  observe  that  the  Resolves  of  the  grand  American  and 
Provincial  Congresses  be  strictly  adhered  to.  Already, 
in  May,  1775,  you  meet  the  watchmen  in  the  streets,  who 
stop  each  passer  after  nine  o'clock  and  make  Mm  tell  his 
business.  Next  year,  in  June,  '7G,  the  town  has  voted  this, 
"that,  should  the  honorable  Congress,  for  the  safety  of 
the  Colonies,  declare  them  independent  of  the  kingdom 
of  Great  Britain,  we  will  solemnly  engage  with  our  lives 
and  fortunes  to  support  them  in  the  measure."  A  town 
up  to  the  mark,  surely,  with  one  foot  boldly  beyond  the 
mark  indeed !  In  October  our  town  is  giving  in  its  alle- 
giance to  the  new  State  government.  In  November  it  is 
voting  its  supplies  to  the  families  of  the  soldiers  who  are 
in  the  field.  In  one  year  more  it  is  instructing  its  repre- 
sentatives to  stand  by  the  new  confederation.  It  has  its 
word  to  say  about  the  currency,  about  the  taxes.  It  rec- 
ommends out  of  its  town-meeting  a  plan  of  national  office- 
giving  and  office-holding  which  might  well  have  been  a 
Civil  Service  Bill  for  all  our  history,  and  done  us  good. 
Finally,  in  1788,  it  debated  and  divided  about  the  ratifica- 
tion of  the  Federal  Constitution  ;  but  when  the  convention 
in  Boston  voted  in  its  favor,  the  town  accepted  it  most 
loyally.  Meanwhile,  its  soldiers  were  in  the  field ;  98  men 
were  in  constant  service  during  the  war.  The  town's 
militia  in  1777  numbered  670  men.  Twenty  belonging 
to  this,  which  then  was  the  South  Parish,  died  in  the  Revo- 
lution. All  these  things,  with  their  picturesque  details, 
the  Andover  boy  of  the  time  knows  by  heart,  and  is  proud 
of  his  town,  standing  firm  and  loyal  and  self-sacrificing 
among  the  towns  that  first  fought  for  independence  and 
then  built  up  the  new  nation. 

Ah,  how  alike  all  history  seems !     How  old,  and  yet 
eternally  how  new,  these  elementary  emotions  are  !     How 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  MEMORIAL   HALL.  291 

the  first  instincts  that  make  men  fight  for  freedom  and 
good  government  and  truth  last  on  from  age  to  age  !  Old 
and  yet  ever  young,  like  the  eternal  skies,  the  ever  self- 
renewing  trees,  the  gray  and  child-like  sea  !  In  1776  and 
1861  these  Andover  men  are  the  same  men  still.  The  very 
names  of  this  last  war  are  the  names  of  that  old  struggle. 
What  were  the  captains  called  of  the  four  militia  compa- 
nies of  1777  ?  Johnson,  and  Lovejoy,  and  Abbot,  and  Holt. 
And  were  not  these  saine  names — Johnson,  and  Lovejoy, 
and  Abbot,  and  Holt — high  on  the  muster-rolls  of  1862  ? 
It  was  the  same  town  still,  as  our  wdiole  history  is  one  in 
its  continual  fideUty  to  these  principles  which  have  forever 
and  ever  "  the  dew  of  their  youth." 

Such  was  Andover  in  the  military  history  of  the  Revo- 
lution— a  good  strong  soldier  town.  The  battles  of  the 
countrj'  were  not  fought  without  her.  And  yet  one  is 
very  glad  to  know  that  even  then  the  thought  of  scholar- 
ship and  education  was  at  work  here,  not  stifled  by,  no 
doubt  really  giving  life  to,  the  loyalty  and  military  spirit 
of  the  time.  It  was  here  that  the  College  Library  found 
refuge  from  the  dangers  of  the  war.  It  was  here,  in  the 
very  thickest  of  the  Revolutionary  struggle,  in  1777,  that 
the  Phillips  Academy  took  birtli,  with  a  constitution  all 
the  more  remarkable  because  it  had  no  precedents  to  fol- 
low, no  pattern  to  model  itself  upon.  Some  of  the  best 
thinkers  in  the  hard  new  work  of  forming  the  National 
and  State  governments  came  from  these  hills.  Yes,  this 
same  union  of  loyalty  and  education  which  is  typified  in 
our  new  Hall  to-day,  shines  forth  out  of  the  last  century's 
history.  The  soldier  and  the  scholar  came  forth  together 
from  the  culture  of  our  town.  A  powder-mill  and  a  paper- 
mill  were  its  two  first  industries,  and  the  same  gentle 
Shawshin  turned  the  wheels  of  both. 

It  was  just  here,  at  the  close  of  the  old  and  the  begin- 
ning of  the  new  period  of  our  history,  that  the  visit  of 


292  ESSAYS  AND   ADDBESSES. 

the  great  master  of  the  work  that  had  been  done  makes  a 
day  memorable  in  the  history  of  Andover.  Hardly  can 
we  dedicate  our  Hall  to-day  without  remembering  how, 
on  the  morning  of  Thiu'sday,  the  5th  of  November,  1789, 
General  Washington  passed  by  the  place  where  it  now 
stands,  on  his  way  from  the  house  of  Deacon  Abbot,  not 
far  beyond  it,  where  he  had  breakfasted.  The  veterans 
and  children  must  have  crowded  on  the  little  mound  to 
see  the  father  of  his  new-born  country  pass ;  and  the  town 
tradition  has  not  yet  ceased  to  tell  of  the  kiss  that  he  left 
on  the  lips  of  one  of  the  town's  daughters,  which  was  kept 
there,  sacred  and  unmolested,  for  a  week.  The  same  morn- 
ing, on  the  common  opposite  the  Mansion  House  upon 
the  hill,  he  sat  upon  his  horse  and  heard  the  grateful 
greetings  of  the  crowd,  and  then  passed  off  by  the  old 
Wilmington  road  to  Lexington.  It  was  a  noble  gift  of 
Providence  that  in  one  man  shovdd  be  comprised  and 
pictured,  for  the  dullest  eyes  to  see,  the  majesty  and  mean- 
ing of  the  struggle  that  gave  our  nation  birth. 

It  would  be  interesting,  but  far  too  long,  to  trace  how 
the  experiences  of  the  country,  from  the  War  of  Indepen- 
dence down  to  the  struggle  for  the  Union,  were  all  felt  in 
this  most  American  town.  The  strongest  of  them  all,  the 
growing  love  for  freedom,  the  growing  dread  and  hate  of 
slavery,  found  many  hearts  that  entered  into  it  deeply. 
The  honored  friend  of  Andover,  to  whom  it  mainly  owes 
its  new  Memorial  HaU,  was  one  of  the  antislavery  pioneers. 
It  is  interesting  to  know  that  one  of  the  choicest  natural 
beauties  of  the  town  takes  its  name  from  a  slave  who  was 
liberated  because  his  master,  Jonathan  Jackson,  of  New- 
buryport,  felt  the  "  impropriety  of  holding  any  person  in 
constant  bondage,  more  especially  at  the  time  when  his 
country  was  warmly  contending  for  the  liberty  every  man 
ought  to  enjoy."  It  gives  a  sort  of  commemorative  luster 
to  the  silvery  beauty  of  "  Pomp's  Pond." 


DEDICATION  OF  TEE  MEMORIAL   HALL.  293 

Thus  I  liave  tried  to  sketch,  in  haste,  the  truly  American 
character  of  Andover.  Everywhere  and  always,  fii'st  and 
last,  she  has  been  the  manly,  sti'aightf  orward,  sober,  patri- 
otic New  England  town.  But  as  we  read  her  history,  it 
seems  as  if  all  thus  far  were  but  preparatory  for  the  deeper 
experience  that  came — ah  !  is  it  possible  ? — twelve  years 
ago.  Shall  I  try  to  recount  the  history  of  Andover  during 
the  Rebellion  ?  Shall  I  try  to  tell  the  story  of  the  brave 
men  bred  here,  who  fought  and  died  in  the  war  for  the 
Union,  and  whose  names  are  written  forever  on  the  white 
tablets  of  yonder  hall  ?  There  is  no  rhetoric  that  can  ap- 
proach the  plain  recital  of  the  well-remembered  facts  ;  and 
all  of  us  have  reason  to  be  thankful  that  in  oui'  midst  a 
gentleman  has  come  who  has  given  such  lavish  time  and 
labor  to  the  noble  work  of  collecting  and  recording  all 
that  can  be  known  of  the  behavior  of  Andover,  and  An- 
dover men,  during  the  war.  I  cannot  omit  to  honor  the 
industry  and  to  thank  the  courtesy  of  my  friend,  Mr.  Sam- 
uel Raymond,  who,  led  by  the  sacred  impulse  of  honor 
to  a  pure  and  noble  son  who  died  in  the  glorious  suffer- 
ings of  a  Southern  prison,  has  prepared  for  this  town  such 
a  record  as  hardly  any  town  can  possess  of  its  heroes, 
and  their  deeds  and  deaths.  You  may  not  need  it,  but 
your  children  will.  Fresh  in  your  memories  still  are  all 
those  days  with  all  their  stirring  scenes,  all  their  inspiring 
thoughts.  Do  you  remember?  Surely  you  have  not  for- 
gotten. On  the  18tli  of  April,  1861,  only  a  few  days  after 
the  fli'st  gun  at  Sumter,  the  people  gathered  for  solemn 
consideration.  Then  came  the  great  town-meeting  only 
two  days  later.  Its  speeches,  out  of  lips  that  are  still 
speaking  here  among  us,  rang  with  unhesitating  loyalty. 
Little  we  knew  the  whole  of  what  was  coming ;  but,  come 
what  might,  these  men  were  ready  for  it.  The  women 
were  eager  with  their  work.  The  men  were  drilling  in- 
stantly.    This  church  heard  the  bold,  hopeful  sermon  that 


294  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

was  preached  to  them.  The  flag  waved  everywhere :  over 
the  church  and  dwellmg,  over  the  consecrated  halls  of  the 
seminary,  and  above  the  traffic  of  the  stores.  In  June 
the  Andover  company  went  out.  The  elders  of  the  town 
sent  them  forth  with  a  blessing  that  was  full  of  lofty 
hope.  Its  soldiers  were  men  who  knew  what  it  all  meant, 
and  rejoiced  in  their  task.  They  took  their  ^'thinking 
bayonets  "  with  earnest,  faithful  hands.  Soon  they  were 
in  the  field,  as  Company  H  of  the  14th  Regiment  of  Mas- 
sachusetts Volunteers.  They  were  the  first,  but  other 
levies  followed  qiuck.  I  have  read  down  the  record,  and 
know  that  this  town  of  New  Engand  was  always  up  to 
the  duty  of  the  hour.  No  call  of  the  great  war  governor, 
echoing  the  summons  of  the  noble  President,  ever  found 
her  listless  or  discouraged.  In  all,  she  put  nearly  five 
hundred  men  into  the  field.  Twenty  commissioned  officers 
came  from  her  citizens.  Over  and  above  all  the  State  aid, 
she  gave  more  than  $30,000  for  her  soldiers  and  her  sol- 
diers' families,  whom  she  never  forgot.  Her  men  fought 
in  some  forty  regiments.  At  aU  the  great  battles  of  the 
Army  of  the  Potomac — at  Ball's  Bluff,  at  Cedar  Mountain, 
at  Antietam,  at  South  Mountain,  at  Fredericksburg,  at 
Spottsylvania,  at  ChanceUorsville,  at  Gettysbiu'g,  in  the 
Wilderness — the  men  of  Andover  were  in  the  ranks,  and 
did  their  duty  weU.  In  the  horrible  prisons  of  Danville 
and  Salisbury  and  Anderson ville,  boys  whom  Andover  had 
nursed  breathed  out  their  starved  and  tortured  lives. 
How  the  old  Andover  names  stand  out  down  the  long  list ! 
Abbot,  and  Barnard,  and  Farnham,  and  Frye ;  Foster,  and 
Holt,  and  Lovejoy;  Marland,  and  Stevens,  and  Merrill. 
They  came  from  all  professions,  from  every  work  and 
class  of  life ;  farmers,  mechanics,  and  students,  all  together, 
all  with  one  common  indignation,  aU  with  one  strong  de- 
termination that  the  country  should  be  saved. 

Do  you  remember  the  May  morning  in  1864  when  the 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  MEMORIAL  HALL.  295 

news  came  of  the  battle  at  Spottsylvania,  where  the  1st 
Eegiment  of  Heavy  Artillery,  in  w^hich  so  many  of  the 
men  of  Andover  were  serving,  was  engaged "?  The  j)eo- 
ple  gathered  in  town-meeting.  They  sent  theii'  letter  of 
thanksgiving  to  their  soldiers.  They  sent  their  represen- 
tatives to  help  the  wounded.  They  welcomed  them  as  they 
came  creeping  back,  and  cared  for  them.  They  wrote 
npon  their  record  for  that  battle,  eight  killed  and  forty 
wounded,  and  were  proud  of  their  champions  and  heroes. 

Do  you  remember  that  July  morning  of  the  same  year 
when  the  three  years'  volunteers  came  home  ?  The  people 
met  them  at  the  depot,  and  escorted  them  in  triumph 
through  the  streets.  Up  the  familiar  road,  over  the  ground 
where  Washington  had  passed  almost  a  century  before, 
you  carried  these  new  defenders  of  their  country  to  the 
town  hall.  You  fed  them  and  made  speeches  to  them, 
and  not  alone  in  these  two  traditional  American  ways — • 
for  Andover  is  still  the  typical  American  town — but  by 
every  method  of  personal  kindness  and  enthusiasm  you 
made  them  know  that  they  were  welcome,  and  that  yon 
•were  proud  of  all  that  they  had  done. 

It  is  pleasant  to  recall  such  scenes.  But  it  is  not  the 
soldiers  who  came  back  whose  names  are  written  on  the 
tablets  which  we  are  just  about  to  consecrate  with  prayer. 
Those  are  the  names  of  the  fifty-two  men  who  died.  Some 
in  the  prison,  and  some  upon  the  field :  some  by  the  Gulf, 
some  1)y  the  James  and  the  Potomac,  some  in  the  prison- 
pen,  some  in  the  sick-room  here  at  home.  That  is  the  roll 
of  those  who  sealed  their  consecration  with  their  death. 
Oh,  the  mysterious  power  of  a  death  for  a  noble  cause! 
The  life  is  truly  given.  It  passes  out  of  the  dying  body 
into  the  cause,  which  lives  anew.  It  is  good  that  not  a 
stack  of  battered  arms,  nor  even  tattered  flags,  are  the 
memorials  that  consecrate  your  hall.  They  would  be  good. 
Let  them  come  there  some  day,  perhaps.     But  a  list  of 


296  ESSAYS  AND   ABUn ESSES. 

men's  names  is  better.  It  signifies  the  total  maniiood  that 
they  gave.  It  was  not  only  their  deeds,  their  strength — 
it  was  themselves  they  consecrated ;  and  a  man  is  always 
more  precious  than  his  work.  I  beg  you,  brothers,  let  us 
remember  not  alone  the  deeds ;  let  the  men  of  the  war  be 
present  with  us  always.  Let  us  be  glad  we  lived  under 
the  same  sky,  drank  of  the  same  streams,  ate  from  the 
same  fields  with  them.  So  shall  we  get  the  truest  bless- 
ing of  their  lives. 

"  Earth  will  remember  them  with  love  and  joy, 
And  oh,  far  better,  God  will  not  forget. 
For  he  who  settles  Freedom's  prineijiles 
Writes  the  death-warrant  of  all  tja-anuy ; 
Who  speaks  the  Truth  stabs  falsehood  to  the  heart, 
And  his  mere  word  makes  despots  tremble  more 
Than  ever  Brutus  with  his  dagger  could." 

How  fast  the  men  of  the  war  have  passed  away  !  Think 
of  the  great  men  who  have  gone.  The  martyr  President 
went  first;  then  the  war-minister,  the  devoted  governor, 
the  far-seeing  statesman,  the  victor  of  Chattanooga,  the 
victor  of  Gettysburg,  and  only  yesterday  the  chief -justice, 
who  was  the  minister  of  finance  during  those  anxious 
years.  How  soon  they  went !  When  the  great  ship  had 
hardly  rounded  into  port;  while,  standing  on  the  shore 
of  peace,  we  felt  the  solid  earth  still  rocking  under  our 
feet  with  the  remembered  heaving  of  the  sea,  they  who 
had  watched  and  labored  for  her  safety  through  the  nights 
and  storms  out  on  midocean,  one  by  one,  as  if  their  work 
was  done,  began  to  pass  to  their  reward,  and  to  what  other 
tasks  we  cannot  know,  awaiting  them  in  other  Avorlds. 
What  have  they  left  behind  them,  they  and  the  humbler 
dead  whom  votive  monuments  and  tender  hearts  remem- 
ber still  in  ever}'  town  and  hamlet  of  their  laud  ?  Not 
only  what  they  did,  not  only  even  what  they  were,  but 
new  tasks  like  their  own  for  us  who  stay  behind  them. 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  MEMORIAL   HALL.  297 

They  did  not  merely  clear  the  field  of  treason.  By  the 
same  labor  they  built  up  a  new  possibility  of  national 
character  and  life.  They  were  like  the  men  who,  in  these 
stony  pastures  of  Andover,  clear  the  rough  field  of  stones 
and  build  the  gray  wall  that  is  to  surround  and  shelter  it, 
out  of  the  same  material,  at  the  same  time.  So  these  men 
left  the  new  national  life  for  us  to  guard  and  develoj?. 
Let  us  not  allow  their  memory  to  die.  Let  no  cynical 
skepticism  scatter  the  enthusiasm  with  which  we  honor 
them.  Let  us  freely  idealize  their  characters.  B}-  purer 
social  life,  by  finer  aspirations,  by  more  unselfishness,  by 
heartier  hatred  of  corruption,  let  us  be  worthy  of  them, 
and  in  our  quiet  duties  build  the  true  memorial  to  the 
characters  of  those  who  found  their  duty  in  the  camp,  the 
prison,  and  the  field,  and  where  they  found  it  did  it  even 
to  the  death.  They  saw  that  their  country  was  like  a 
precious  vase  of  rarest  porcelain,  priceless  while  it  was 
whole,  valueless  if  it  Avas  broken  into  fragments.  What 
they  died  to  keep  whole  may  we  in  our  several  places  live 
to  keep  holy !     So  may  we  be  worthy  of  them. 

"  "V^Tiat,  shall  oue  of  us  • 

Who  struck  the  foremost  man  of  all  the  world 
Contaminate  our  fingers  Avith  base  bribes, 
And  sell  the  mighty  space  of  our  large  honors 
For  so  much  trash  as  may  be  grasped  at  thus? 
I'd  rather  be  a  dog  and  bay  the  moon, 
Thau  such  a  Roman  !  " 

It  is  not  war  but  peace  that  we  desire.  Alas  for  him 
who  now  or  in  the  years  to  come  shall  see  these  votive 
tablets  shine  with  nothing  deeper  than  the  blaze  of  mili- 
tary glor}^ !  It  is  the  peace  which  they  made  possible,  the 
lasting  peace  with  all  its  blessings,  that  the  sculptured 
names  of  these  dead  soldiers  are  to  preach  forever. 

There  let  them  stand  in  our  Memorial  Hall !  Andover 
is  still  the  true  New  England  town.     StiU,  with  her  honor 


298  ESSJYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

for  the  dead,  her  teaching  for  the  lisdng,  she  stands  up 
abreast  of  the  best  life  of  all  the  land.  Upon  her  new 
Hall  let  the  morning  sun  strike  with  its  call  to  duty,  and 
the  evening  gather  with  its  benediction  of  repose.  Let 
its  shelves  be  filled  with  the  noblest  and  purest  literature, 
that  shall  speak  the  same  infinite  lessons  that  the  tablets 
utter  from  its  walls.  Let  the  thoughtful  and  eager  young 
men  and  women  of  many  generations  come  to  its  quiet 
rooms  for  refreshment  and  instruction,  and  drink  deep 
of  its  influence  and  go  out  stronger  for  the  good  work  of 
life.  Let  the  men  of  business,  of  the  shop,  and  the  farm 
pass  under  its  shadow  and  feel  that  there  is  something- 
better  in  this  world  than  success.  Let  the  little  childi'en 
play  about  its  steps  and  tell  one  another  wondering  stories 
about  the  brave  men  wdio  died  long  ago,  and  for  whom 
this  building,  now  grown  gray  with  age,  was  built  in  those 
long-gone  years  that  seem  to  the  child  like  an  eternity. 
We  dedicate  it  to  truth,  to  103'alty,  to  conscience,  to  cour- 
age, and  to  culture.  That  men  should  be  true  to  their 
best  convictions,  and  do  their  simple  duty,  this  is  the  bless- 
ing that  gives  all  blessings  with  it,  and  is  the  fountain  of 
all  charity  and  progress. 

"  Not  to  scatter  bread  and  gold, 
Goods  and  raiment  bought  and  sold, 
But  to  hold  fast  his  simple  sense, 
And  speak  the  speech  of  innocence, 
And  with  hand  and  body  and  blood 
To  make  his  bosom-counsel  good. 
For  he  that  feeds  men  serveth  few, 
He  serves  all  who  dares  be  true." 

It  is  truth  that  we  want  in  every  department  of  our  life. 
In  State  and  Church  Ave  need  it,  at  home  and  on  the  street ; 
in  the  smallest  fashions  and  in  the  most  sacred  mysteries ; 
that  men  should  say  what  they  think,  should  act  out  what 
they  believe,  should  be  themselves  continually,  without 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  MEMORIAL   HALL.  299 

concealment  and  withont  pretense.  When  we  have  that, 
then  we  shall  have  at  least  a  solid  basis  of  reality  on  which 
to  build  all  future  progress.  It  is  the  benefit  of  great  and 
solemn  crises  that  they  give  us  some  characters  which 
manifest  this  simple  truth,  that  they  make  it  to  some  ex- 
tent the  character  of  all  the  time.  We  lay  our  wreaths 
upon  the  graves  of  our  Union  soldiers  because  they  were 
such  men  of  truth ;  and  we  pray  that  their  memory  and 
influence  may  be  strong  among  us  so  long  as  the  nation 
lasts  for  which  they  lived  and  died. 


MILTON  AS  AN  EDUCATOR. 

(Massachusetts  Teachers'  Association,  December  29,  1874.) 

The  subject  of  whicli  I  wish  to  s]3eak  to  you  belongs  to 
the  history  of  education.  That  is  a  region  into  wliich  any 
student  may  enter  without  being  an  intruder ;  and  I  begin 
by  saying  how  desii-able  it  seems  to  me  that  those  who 
are  training  themselves,  or  who  are  being  trained,  for 
teachers  should  study,  as  it  is  not  usual  for  them  to  study 
now,  the  history  of  education.  No  man  to-day  can  prac- 
tise any  of  the  higher  arts  to  the  best  effect  unless  he 
knows  the  history  of  that  art.  Our  life  becomes  extem- 
porized and  fragmentary  unless  each  man  taking  up  his 
work  in  the  world  not  merely  attaches  his  work  to  the 
work  of  those  who  went  before  him  and  begins  where  they 
left  off,  but  also  knows  something  of  the  way  in  which 
his  art  came  to  reach  the  point  at  which  he  finds  it,  and 
so  is  able  to  make  the  labor  which  he  adds  a  part  of  one 
consistent  and  intelligible  progress.  We  want  to  know 
the  blunders  men  have  made,  that  we  may  not  make  them 
over  again ;  we  want  to  know  the  grounds  of  the  partial 
successes  they  have  achieved,  that  we  may  help  to  carry 
forward  these  successes  toward  their  full  result. 

Let  me  remind  you  wliat  are  some  of  the  values  that 
belong  to  the  study  of  the  history  of  education.  First, 
there  is  the  great  general  value  of  experience.  To  know 
what  other  men  have  done  in  the  department  where  you 
have  been  set  to  work  will  make  it  unnecessary  that  you 
should  go  over  again  what  they  have  already  done.     The 

■600 


MILTON  AS  AJSr  EDUCATOR.  301 

student  of  the  history  of  education  finds,  to  his  great  sur- 
prise, that  many  of  the  educational  ideas  of  his  own  time, 
which  seem  to  him  all  fresh  and  new,  were  found  out 
long-  ago,  were  used  awhile  and  then  were  lost  again,  only 
to  be  rediscovered  at  this  later  day.  A  wiser  study  of 
educational  history  would  have  made  this  rediscovery 
unnecessary,  and  so  saved  time  and  strength.  If  every 
generation  has  to  begin  and  prove  over  again  that  two 
times  two  is  four,  what  generation  will  ever  get  beyond 
the  proof  that  ten  times  ten  is  one  hundred  ?  And  then, 
again,  to  know  how  different  studies  came  to  be  intro- 
duced would  often  throw  great  light  upon  the  values  of 
those  studies.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  many  studies 
have  beeu  introduced  legitimately,  for  reasons  which  were 
very  strong,  but  Avliich  were  temporary,  and  then  have 
remained  like  ghosts  haunting  our  schools  long  after  their 
living  necessity  had  died  away.  It  is  always  hard  to  get 
any  study  out  of  our  schools  wdien  it  is  once  in.  Each 
teacher  learning  it  as  a  boy  is  natural^  ready  to  teach  it 
as  a  man.  As  John  Locke  says,  "  It  is  no  wonder  if  those 
who  make  the  fashion  suit  it  to  what  they  have  and  not 
to  what  their  pupils  want."  Here,  surely,  is  the  key  to  a 
great  deal  of  the  conservatism  and  traditionalism  of  our 
teaching ;  and  the  surest  way  to  break  it  down  and  to  get 
rid  of  it  would  be  such  a  wise  study  of  the  history  of  edu- 
cation by  those  who  are  to  teach  as  should  show  them 
how  the  studies  which  they  find  in  school  came  there,  and 
so  help  them  to  judge  wdiether  those  studies  are  to  be 
dropped  as  temporary  necessities  which  have  been  out- 
grown, or  to  be  kept  forever  because  they  are  forever 
usefid. 

Think,  if  you  will,  what  light  the  history  of  education 
would  throw  upon  the  violently  debated  question  of  the 
value  of  methods  of  classical  training.  Was  ever  ques- 
tion so  stupidly  discussed  as  that  has  been  !     It  has  been 


302  ESSAYS  AND  ADDHESSES. 

debated  as  if  it  had  no  history.  But  everybody  who 
thinks  about  it  sees  at  once  that  the  strong  hokl  which 
our  methods  of  teaching  the  Latin  and  Greek  languages 
have  upon  our  schools  comes  in  large  part  from  the  length 
of  time  for  which  they  have  held  their  ground.  They 
come  to  us  from  medieval  times.  But  when  we  go  back 
to  see  what  first  gave  them  their  prominence,  we  find,  to 
quote  the  words  of  one  of  the  noblest  of  educational  his- 
torians, that  "in  the  middle  ages  Latin  was  made  the 
groundwork  of  education,  not  for  the  beauty  of  its  classi- 
cal literature,  nor  because  the  stud}-  of  a  dead  language 
was  the  best  mental  gymnastic  or  the  only  means  of  ac- 
quiring a  masterly  freedom  in  the  use  of  living  tongues, 
but  because  it  was  the  language  of  educated  men  through- 
out western  Europe,  employed  for  public  business,  litera- 
ture, philosophy,  and  science,  above  all  in  God's  provi- 
dence essential  to  the  unity  and  therefore  enforced  by  the 
authority  of  the  western  Church." 

In  other  words,  we  are  perpetuating  a  certain  method 
of  culture  which  was  established  for  reasons  which  have 
long  ago  ceased  to  exist.  The  clear  recognition  of  the 
change  would  not  banish  the  classical  languages  from  oiu* 
course  of  study,  but  it  would  liberate  us  in  the  methods 
of  teaching  them.  It  would  set  us  free  to  teach  them  as 
if  they  are  to  be  kept  a  part  of  the  learning  of  mankind. 
They  must  come  to  be  taught,  not  in  the  minute  niceties 
of  their  grammar,  but  as  the  keys  to  rich  literatures  which 
the  world  cannot  afford  to  lose. 

But  I  only  instance  this  as  one  chance  illustration  of 
the  value  of  the  history  of  education.  I  come  now  to  what 
I  want  to  make  my  subject  for  this  lecture.  I  want  to 
open  Avith  you  one  page  of  that  histor}^  and  see  something 
of  what  is  written  there.  I  want  to  speak  of  the  educa- 
tion, and  especially  of  one  great  educator  of  two  centuries 
ago,  and  see  if  we  can  learn  anything  from  him.     I  turn 


MILTON  AS  AN  EDUCATOR.  303 

to  this  period  with  special  interest,  not  merely  because  it 
is  the  one  which  has  most  attracted  my  own  study,  but 
because  it  is  one  that  so  profoundly  merits  the  study  of 
us  all.  The  seventeenth  century  is  really  the  first  thor- 
oughly modern  century  of  English  life.  The  seventeenth- 
century  Englishman  is  the  earhest  English  being  whom 
we  of  the  nineteenth  century  can  easily  and  perfectly  un- 
derstand. It  is  not  so  in  the  century  before.  The  men 
and  women  of  the  Tudor  times  are  different  and  distant 
from  us.  They  are  as  little  modern  in  their  character  as 
in  their  dress  and  houses.  But  with  the  opening  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  almost  talking  us  by  surprise,  we 
come  on  men  whom  we  can  compi-ehend — whose  whole 
look  is  familiar  to  us.  Who  does  not  feel  the  difference 
between  Cardinal  Wolsey  and  Cromwell  in  this  regard  ? 
One  is  all  medieval  and  the  other  is  all  modern.  Eliot, 
Hampden,  Pym,  Laud,  Falkland — all  the  men  of  the  civil 
wars,  whether  i\\ej  were  Royalists  or  Puritans,  have  this 
new  intelligil)leness.  "We  have  evidently  crossed  the  line 
and  are  in  our  own  land.  They  are  hardly  farther  fi-om 
us — in  some  respects  they  are  not  so  far  from  us  of  New 
England — as  the  inen  of  the  last  centur}'',  the  men  of  our 
own  Revolution.  If  history  were  tauglit  among  4is  as  it 
ought  to  be,  I  think  you  will  agree  with  me  that  there  is 
no  period  of  all  the  history  of  the  world  that  ought  to  be 
taught  to  our  New  England  youth  more  fully  than  that 
which  is  most  like  our  own,  and  most  intelligible  to  us, 
and  the  richest  in  seeds  of  fruits  which  we  behold  to-day 
— the  seventeenth  century  in  England. 

Now  in  the  midst  of  tliis  great  century  there  stands 
forth  in  England  one  picturesque  and  t3"pical  man.  The 
strongest  ages  do  thus  incorporate  their  life  in  some  one 
strong  representative,  and  hold  him  up  before  the  world 
to  tell  their  story.  And  the  most  tjq^ical  man  of  EngHsh 
seventeenth-century  life  was  John  Milton.     I  am  di*awn 


304  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

to  him  because  of  his  connection  with  the  history  of  edu- 
cation, Avhich  I  shall  speak  of  by  and  by.  But  before  I 
can  speak  of  that,  I  must  remind  you  of  how  in  general 
Milton  embodied  in  his  life  all  those  characteristics  wliich 
make  the  seventeenth  century  strong  and  positive  in  his- 
tory as  we  look  back  upon  it.  Not  even  Cromwell  so 
largely  embodied  all  its  qualities.  "  He  was,"  as  Professor 
Seeley  strongly  says,  ''the  most  cultivated  man  of  his 
time,  perhaps  we  might  say  the  most  cultivated  man  that 
ever  lived  in  England;"  but  his  culture  was  aU  of  that 
best  sort  which  humanizes  instead  of  unhumanizing  its 
subject,  and  makes  it  more  and  not  less  a  representative 
and  specimen  of  the  time  in  which  he  lives. 

Milton  was  born  in  1608,  on  the  9th  of  December,  at  a 
quarter  past  six  in  the  morning,  at  the  Spread  Eagle  in 
Bread  Street,  in  London,  where  his  father  was  a  prosper- 
ous scrivener.  That  father  had  been  disinlierited  hy  his 
father  because  he  had  become  a  Protestant  and  a  Bible 
had  been  found  in  his  chamber ;  already  there  was  protest 
and  reform  in  the  blood.  He  entered  at  Christ  College 
at  Cambridge  when  he  was  fifteen  years  old,  and  left  be- 
fore his  course  was  finished,  in  some  sort  of  mysterious 
disgrace.  One  of  the  endless  discussions  of  his  biogra- 
phers is  whether  he  was  flogged  in  college.  Dr.  Johnson, 
who  does  not  like  Milton,  declares  he  was,  but  it  seems 
doubtful;  still  he  might  have  been,  for  flogging  in  the 
colleges  was  not  yet  obsolete,  and  there  was  that  soul  in 
the  audacious  sclioolboy  which  always  brings  the  school- 
boy's body  into  peril.  But  he  left  college,  and  in  a  few 
years  went  abroad  upon  that  Eui'opean  journey  which  is 
almost  a  prominent  event  in  English  literary  history. 
Before  he  went  he  had  already  written  "  Comus "  and 
"  Lycidas,"  the  "Allegro"  and  ''  Penseroso."  Upon  the  Con- 
tinent he  saw  great  men,  and  they  made  miTch  of  him.  In 
Paris  he  saw  Grotius ;  in  Florence,  the  imprisoned  Gali- 


MILTON  AS  AN  EDUCATOR.  305 

leo ;  in  Rome,  the  Cardinal  Barberini.  He  made  friend- 
ships that  lasted  all  his  life,  and  he  filled  his  mind  full  of 
knowledge.  But  just  as  he  was  planning  to  go  on  to 
Sicily  and  Greece,  the  news  of  the  civil  war  at  home  came 
to  him,  and.  Englishman  that  he  was,  he  hurried  home. 

Just  with  the  same  spirit  with  which  so  many  of  our 
young  men  who  seemed  lost  in  the  fascination  of  foreign 
study  turned  at  the  earliest  drum-beat  of  our  war  and 
hurried  home  that  the  war  might  not  fight  itself  through 
without  them,  so  Milton  turned  and  left  beloved  Italy 
behind  him  and  hurried  home  to  give  the  Parliament  and 
the  Commonwealth  the  help  of  his  pen  and,  if  they  needed 
that,  of  his  SAvord  too.  Here  he  became  at  once  the  cham- 
pion of  the  popular  cause.  He  laid  poetry  aside,  and  for 
the  next  twenty  years  the  press  teemed  with  his  pam- 
phlets. He  wrote  against  the  bishops,  against  royalt}^, 
against  the  Church.  He  j)leaded  for  the  freedom  of  print- 
ing, for  the  right  of  rebellion,  and,  having  his  own  home 
reasons  for  turning  liis  thoughts  that  way,  for  the  hberty 
of  divorce.  After  a  while  he  was  Cromwell's  Latin  secre- 
tary, and  gave  the  great  Protector  his  best  praises  and 
best  help. 

So  things  went  on,  with  Milton's  heart  and  pen  always 
in  the  very  thick  of  them,  until  Oliver  died,  and  then  the 
melancholy  Restoration  came.  The  great  champion  of 
liberty  became  silent,  and  escaped  the  penalties  of  all  the 
past  years — nobody  has  ever  been  able  to  make  out  just 
how.  He  was  blind  now,  and  getting  old.  But  "  Para- 
dise Lost"  was  yet  to  be  written  before  he  could  have 
liberty  to  die.  It  was  written  in  silence,  and  the  world 
hardly  took  more  note  when  it  was  pul)lished  than  it  does 
when  the  sun  rises.  Then  came  the  "  Paradise  Regained," 
and  then  the  '*  Samson  Agonistes,"  the  last  great  outcry 
of  his  passionate  heart ;  and  then  at  last,  on  Sunday  the 
8th  of  November,  1674,  he  died  in  peace,  and  was  buried 


^jOO  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

in  the  chancel  of  St.  Giles,  Cripplegate,  where  probably 
his  bones  are  lying  still. 

He  was  the  most  typical  Englishman  of  the  most  typi- 
cal and  strongest  English  time ;  and  this  might  interest 
any  one  who  had  red  English  blood  rnnning  in  liis  veins. 
Bnt  he  especially  belongs  to  us — he  has  his  place  here 
among  those  who  are  interested  in  education,  because  this 
t3'pical  Englishman  was  a  schoolmaster,  and  one  of  the 
most  thoughtful  and  suggestive  reasoners  on  education 
that  the  English  race  ever  produced.  He  is  near  enough 
to  us  to  let  us  luiderstand  him,  but  he  is  far  enough  away 
from  us  to  let  us  look  at  him  with  something  of  romantic 
feeling,  as  we  think  of  the  greatest  of  Enghshmen  sitting 
with  a  dozen  boys  about  him,  not  merely  teaching  them, 
but  reasoning  about  their  teaching,  looking  over  their 
heads  and  seeing  the  distant  visions  of  the  perfect  educa- 
tion of  the  future,  as  true  a  poet  when  he  sat  in  the  teach- 
er's chair  as  when  before  his  organ  he  chant-ed  lofty  hymns 
and  told  the  story  of  eternities.  It  came  about  in  this 
wa}'.  Milton,  returning  from  Italy  when  the  civil  war 
broke  out,  found  in  his  father's  house  two'children  of  his 
widowed  sister,  Mrs.  Philips — Edward  and  John — and  he 
began  to  teach  them.  Soon  other  boj^s,  sons  of  his  friends, 
came  in,  and  his  last  biographer,  Mr.  Masson,  who  has  left 
little  for  any  one  coming  after  him  to  learn  of  Milton,  has 
gathered  up,  iu  all,  traces  of  twenty  or  tliirt}'  youths  who 
at  one  time  or  other  were  the  great  mastei''s  pupils.  The 
school  was  alwaj's  in  the  teacher's  house,  first  in  Alders- 
gate  Street,  where  it  was  what  his  pupil  Philips  describes 
as  a  '^  garden  house  at  the  end  of  an  entr}" " — a  quiet  spot, 
no  doubt,  with  a  little  plot  of  ground,  up  a  sleepy  court, 
in  what  is  now  the  very  heart  of  "  streaming  London's 
central  roar" — and  then  afterward  in  a  house  in  what 
was  called  Barbican,  where,  when  he  was  once  settled,  his 
pupil  writes,  "the  house  looked  lilce  a  house  of  the  Muses, 


MILTON  AS  AN  EDUCATOR,  307 

tliougli  the  access  of  scliolars  was  not  great."  It  certainly 
seems  not  very  inspiring.  Philips  tried  hard  to  show  that 
his  uncle  never  was  a  common  teacher. 

"Possibly  his  proceeding  thus  far  in  the  education  of 
youth,"  he  says,  "  may  have  been  the  occasion  of  some  of 
his  adversaries  calling  him  pedagogue  and  schoolmaster, 
when,  as  it  is  well  known,  he  never  set  up  for  a  public 
school  to  teach  all  the  young  fry  of  a  parish,  but  only  was 
willing  to  impart  his  learning  and  knowledge  to  relations 
and  to  sons  of  some  gentlemen  that  were  his  intimate 
friends." 

And  Dr.  Johnson,  churchman  and  Loyalist,  who  never 
liked  the  great  Independent  and  rebel,  says  of  his  school 
that  "from  this  wonder-working  academy  I  do  not  know 
that  there  ever  proceeded  any  man  very  eminent  for 
knowledge."  But  still  the  fact  remains  that  Milton  had 
his  school,  and  really  taught  it,  that  he  wrote  a  Latin 
accidence,  that  he  planned  from  time  to  time  a  scheme  of 
a  great  school,  that  the  sti'ong  hand  that  wrote  the  "  Sam- 
son "  flogged  his  pupils  till  they  roared,  and  the  genius 
that  conceived  "  Paradise  Lost "  knew  nothing  unworthy 
or  incongruous  in  the  school-room  drudger}^ 

Just  think  of  being  Milton's  scholar !  Every  art  slips 
down  into  technicalities  and  loses  its  first  inspiring  prin- 
ciples. It  cannot  keej)  the  grandeur  of  ideas.  What 
technical  skill  the  great  teacher  of  Aldersgate  Street  may 
have  had,  what  discipline  he  kept,  how  he  managed  his 
markings  and  rankings,  we  cannot  know ;  but  at  least  we 
are  sure  that  in  that  dingy  room,  with  the  dingy  London 
roses  blooming  outside  the  window,  the  ideas  of  teaching, 
the  ends  of  scholarship,  the  principles  of  education,  never 
were  forgotten  or  lost  out  of  sight.  No  doubt  we  should 
see  and  feel  this  for  ourselves  if  it  were  possible  for  us  to 
open  the  old  school-room  door  and  go  in  and  sit  down 
among  the  scholars,  where  the  great  master,  waxing  dim- 


308  ESSAYS  AND   ADDBESSES. 

mer  of  sight  and  getting  on  toward  stony  blindness  every 
day,  should  not  discover  us.  But  this  we  cannot  do,  and 
so  we  are  glad  we  can  tiirn  awaj?"  from  the  mere  mention 
of  Milton's  actual  school- teaching,  which  is  so  unsatisfy- 
ing, and  find  that  he  has  written  down  for  us  what  he 
thought  and  believed  about  school-teaching  in  his  famous 
tract  on  education. 

There  was  in  Milton's  time  in  London  a  well-known 
gentleman  by  the  name  of  Samuel  Hartlib.  He  was  the 
son  of  a  Polish  merchant,  who  had  married  an  English 
lady  and  settled  himself  in  England.  He  seems  to  have 
had  a  fresh,  bright,  kindly  mind.  Everybody  knew  him ; 
he  interested  himself  in  everything  that  was  live  and 
good ;  he  talked  with  everybody  who  had  anything  to  say. 
Every  great  city  has  just  such  men — we  know  such  men 
in  ours.  This  gentleman  had  often  talked  with  the  great 
schoolmaster  about  education,  and  was  very  much  inter- 
ested in  what  Milton  said;  and  he  had  begged  Milton 
often,  as  they  sat  together  talking,  to  write  down  what  he 
was  saying,  so  that  it  might  not  be  lost.  The  busy  Milton 
at  last  complied,  and  the  result  is  that  we  have  a  dozen 
pages  of  his  stately  prose,  in  which  he  pictures  his  ideal 
of  school-teaching  and  gives  us,  it  is  safe  to  say,  a  pro- 
spectus of  philosophic  education  within  which  almost  all 
the  progress  of  our  modern  schools  has  been  included,  and 
which  it  is  very  far  yet  from  outgrowing.  Surely  it  will 
be  interesting  to  look  at  his  ideas  in  the  light  of  modern 
developments.  I  know  how  often  practical  teachers  are 
impatient  of  new  theories.  The}^  do  not  love  to  listen  to 
a  mere  philosopher  who  sits  in  his  study  and  tells  them 
what  a  school  ought  to  be.  But  remember,  Milton's  ideas 
were  not  wholly  theories.  He  had  seen  some  practice. 
And  remember,  too,  that  if  the  teacher's  art  be  in  any 
high  sense  an  art  at  all,  it  must  have  a  philosophy  behind 
it.     If  we  would  not  allow  it  to  sink  into  a  mere  set  of 


MILTOX  AS  AX  EDUCATOE.  309 

mles,  and  depend  for  its  success  on  certain  mere  tricks  or 
knacks,  it  must  forever  refresh  itself  out  of  the  fonntaiu 
of  first  principles  and  inspire  itself  with  the  contempla- 
tion of  even  unattainable  ideals. 

This  leads  us  to  a  brief  sketch  of  the  main  thoughts 
which  this  essay  of  the  great  Englishman  contains.  I 
am  surprised,  Avhen  I  enumerate  them,  to  see  how  thor- 
oughly they  are  the  thoughts. which  all  our  modern  edu- 
cation has  tried  to  realize.  Here  they  are  f  idly  conceived 
in  the  rich  mind  of  the  representative  man  of  two  cen- 
tm-ies  ago.  This  is  the  value  of  his  treatise  in  the  history 
of  education. 

Milton's  ideas,  then,  about  education  are  really  reduci- 
ble to  three  great  ideas,  which  may  be  thus  named :  natn- 
ralness,  practicalness,  nobleness.  These  are  the  three  first 
necessities  of  education,  which  he  is  always  trying  to 
apply ;  and  what  has  modern  education  done  more  than 
this "? 

First,  let  us  see  what  he  makes  of  naturalness.  His 
whole  tract  was  a  protest.  He  was  always  a  protester,  as 
every  enthusiast  and  idealist  must  be.  Education,  as  he 
found  it,  was  unnatural.  It  was  all  a  priori  and  deduc- 
tive. Not  yet  had  the  Baconian  methods  invaded  the 
school-rooms  of  his  land.  Milton  raises  his  voice  in  behalf 
of  an  education  that  should  read  its  rid.es  in  the  nature  of 
the  scholars  who  are  taught.  See  what  some  of  the  illus- 
trations are.  He  pleads  for  the  study  of  the  concrete  as 
necessarily  previous  to  the  study  of  the  abstract. 

"  I  deem  it  to  be  an  old  error  of  universities,"  he  says, 
"not  well  recovered  from  the  scholastick  grossness  of 
barbarous  ages,  that  instead  of  beginning  with  arts  most 
easie,  and  these  he  such  as  are  most  obvious  to  the  sence,  they 
present  their  young  unmatriculated  novices  at  first  com- 
ing with  the  most  intellective  abstractions  of  logick  and 
metaphysicks." 


310  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

And  he  goes  on  to  show  how  such  an  unnatural  begin- 
ning leads  either  to  an  ambitious  and  mercenary  or  iguo- 
rantly  zealous  divinity,  or  to  "  the  trade  of  law  grounded 
on  the  promising  and  pleasing  thoughts  of  htigious  terms, 
fat  contention  and  flowing  fees,"  or  to  a  statecraft  with 
"  souls  unprincipled  in  vertue  and  true  generous  breeding." 
Again,  he  believes  thoroughly  that  the  right  knowledge, 
rightfully  given,  is  a  joy  and  not  a  disgust  to  the  mind 
that  receives  it. 

"  I  doubt  not  but  that  ye  shall  have  more  adoe  to  drive 
our  dullest  and  laziest  3'oath,  our  stocks  and  stalls,  from 
the  infinite  desire  of  such  a  happy  nurtiu'e,  than  we  have 
now  to  hale  and  drag  our  choicest  and  hopefullest  wits  to 
that  asinine  feast  of  sour  thistles  or  brambles  which  is 
commonly  set  before  them,  as  all  the  food  and  entertain- 
ment of  their  tenderest  and  most  docile  age." 

It  was  a  time  of  good,  strong,  plain  words — and  Milton 
was  a  man  of  his  time. 

Again,  no  apostle  of  the  new  education  has  ever  more 
exalted  ohservation  as  the  organ  and  method  of  instruction. 

"I  should  not  then  be  a  persuader  to  them  of  studjdng 
much  then,  after  two  or  three  years  they  have  well  laid 
their  grounds,  but  to  ride  out  in  companies  with  prudent 
and  staid  guides  to  all  the  quarters  of  the  land,  learning 
and  observing  all  places  of  strength,  all  commodities  of 
building  and  of  sod,  for  towns  and  tillage,  harbours  and 
ports  for  trade.  .  .  .  These  ways  would  try  all  their  pecu- 
liar gifts  of  nature,  and  if  there  were  any  secret  excellence 
among  them  would  fetch  it  out." 

To  learn  the  concrete  before  the  abstract,  to  learn  by 
appetite  and  not  by  compulsion,  to  learn  as  far  as  possi- 
ble by  observation  and  not  by  hearsay — tell  me,  have  our 
schools  so  fully  realized  and  accepted  these  great  princi- 
ples of  learning  that  we  can  hear  them  laid  do\vn  clearly 
and  absolutely  by  a  teacher  of  two  centuries  ago  without 


MILTON  AS  AX  EDUCATOR.  311 

sui'prise  ?  Is  our  education  so  true  to  uatui-e  that  we  can 
help  wondering  to  see  how  he  believed  in  the  necessity  of 
naturalness  f 

The  second  characteristic  of  all  Milton's  ideas  of  educa- 
tion was  its  practicalness.  This  stands  out  in  his  very 
definition  of  education : 

"  I  call  therefore  a  compleat  and  generous  education 
that  which  fits  a  man  to  perform  justly,  skillfully,  and 
magnanimously,  all  the  offices,  both  private  and  publick, 
of  peace  and  war." 

It  is  Miltonic  in  its  comprehensiveness,  but  it  is  alto- 
gether practical.  As  his  education  must  issue  from  the 
nature  of  man.  so  it  must  come  home  to  the  use  of  man. 
Again,  see  the  illustrations.  He  has  no  patience  with  the 
teachings  of  language  for  its  own  sake.  All  that  folly, 
still  prevalent  among  us,  which  begins  to  teach  a  boy 
Latin  and  Greek,  not  as  if  it  aimed  to  introduce  him  to 
two  noble  literatures,  but  as  if  it  intended  to  make  liim 
a  grammarian  and  philologian,  so  busying  itself  at  once 
with  all  the  niceties  of  grammar — all  this  he  could  not 
bear. 

"  Though  a  linguist  should  pride  himself  to  have  aU  the 
tongues  that  Babel  cleft  the  world  into,  yet,  if  he  have 
not  studied  the  solid  things  in  them  as  weU  as  the  words 
and  lexicons,  he  were  nothing  so  much  to  be  esteemed  a 
learned  man  as  any  yeoman  or  tradesman  competently 
wise  in  his  mother-dialect  only." 

Tilings  and  not  words  was  the  watchword  of  the  seven- 
teenth century — and,  once  more,  Milton  was  a  man  of  his 
time.  In  all  his  treatment  of  the  languages,  we  want  to 
remember  that  Latin  was  still  a  tongue  of  use.  Was  not 
this  very  Milton  Latin  secretary  to  the  Protector  f 

Another  idea  of  his  was  that  boys  should  learn  their 
Greek  and  Latin  by  reading  books  wdiich  were  themselves 
manuals  of  science,  and  so  seek  language  only  in  seeking 


312  ESSAYS  AM)   ADDEESSES. 

sometliing  farther  on,  the  knowledge  of  the  things  of  which 
the  world  was  made.  Cato,  Varro,  and  Columella,  Celsus, 
Pliny,  and  Solinus,  Hesiod,  Theocritus,  Aratus,  "and  the 
usual  part  of  Virgil" — these  are  the  books  from  which 
boys  were  to  learn  their  G-reek  and  Latin.  We  may  not 
think  the  plan  a  good  one,  but  at  least  it  indicates  the 
practical  character  of  all  his  scheme.  He  claims  strongly 
that  English  boys  ought  to  be  educated  in  England,  and 
would  only  let  them  travel  when  they  have  come  to  "  three- 
or  four-and-twenty  j^ears  of  age." 

"  Nor  shall  we  then  need  the  monsieurs  of  Paris  to  take 
our  hopeful  youth  into  their  slight  and  prodigal  custodies, 
and  send  them  over  back  again  transformed  into  mimics, 
apes,  and  kic  shoes." 

When  we  read  this,  we  feel  like  crying  out  with  Words- 
worth :  "  Milton,  thou  shouldst  be  living  at  this  hour." 
Would  that  he  might  preach  this  doctrine  to  our  Ameri- 
can fathers  and  mothers  !  I  must  not  dwell  on  other  of 
his  practical  ideas — but  the;^'  are  many.  He  would  em- 
ploy experts  to  teach  the  several  arts — *'  Procure  as  oft  as 
shall  Ijc  needful  the  helpful  experiences  of  hunters,  fowl- 
ers, fishermen,  shepherds,  gardeners,  apothecaries,  and  in 
the  other  sciences,  architects,  engineers,  mariners,  anato- 
mists, who  doubtless  would  be  ready,  some  for  reward  and 
some  to  favor  such  a  hopeful  seminary." 

His  rules  for  exercise  would  satisfy  the  most  eager 
champion  of  physical  culture.  Everywhere  it  is  the  man, 
the  citizen,  he  wants  to  make.  Mere  aimless  scholarship 
will  not  content  him. 

The  third  of  the  pervading  ideas  of  Milton's  education 
I  call  nohleness.  We  are  struck  instantty  with  the  lofty 
tone  that  breathes  through  all.  "  Inflamed  with  the  study 
of  learning  and  the  admiration  of  virtue  " — so  sounds  his 
royal  phrase.  ''  Infusing  into  their  young  breasts  such  an 
ingenuous  and  noble  ardour  as  would  not  fail  to  make 


CO  V RAGE.  329 

acts  of  public  men.  But  it  is  cowardice.  It  is  the  dis- 
position of  one  part  of  our  peoj)le  to  fall  in  with  current 
ways  of  working,  to  run  with  the  mass,  and  of  another 
part  to  rush  headlong  into  this  or  that  new  scheme  or 
policy  of  opposition  merely  to  escape  the  stigma  of  con- 
servatism. Neither  the  conservative  nor  the  radical  has 
the  monopoly  of  cowardice.  Neither  timidity  nor  reckless- 
ness is  really  brave.  No  man  on  any  side  is  truly  brave 
in  thought  who  is  listening  for  other  people's  voices  either 
to  assent  to  or  to  contradict  them. 

There  is  a  class  among  us,  a  growing  class,  I  think — a 
class  which  all  our  educational  machinery  ought  to  do 
much  to  increase — which,  not  standing  aloof  from  demo- 
ci'atic  life  and  hating  our  institutions,  but  thoroughly  a 
part  of  them,  thoroughly  believing  in  them,  still  is  deter- 
mined to  think  freely.  Our  education  is  missing  its  best 
work  unless  it  is  furnishing  to  those  whom  it  trains  just 
such  strong  standing- ground  in  the  midst  of  our  popu- 
lar turmoil — a  ground  where  man  ma}^  stand  and  see  the 
poAver  of  the  people  and  yet  not  yield  up  his  judgment  to 
them,  see  the  folly  of  the  people  and  yet  not  be  driven 
into  contempt  of  them,  but  think  his  own  thought  still 
and  bring  the  results  of  his  independent  thinking  to  cor- 
roborate or  to  correct  the  chance  judgments  of  the  caucus 
or  the  street.  The  thorough-going  partisan  and  the  bitter, 
captious  cynic  are  both  cowards.  The  loud  and  indiscrim- 
inate applause  of  one,  the  other's  miserable  sneer,  both  are 
contemptible  beside  the  open,  s;>mipathetic  thoughtfulness 
of  the  man  who  believes  in  his  country  but  thinks  for  him- 
self, and  so  is  always  bringing  an  intelligent  disagree- 
ment or  an  intelligent  assent  as  a  real  contribution  to  his 
country's  policy. 

Why  do  I  saA^  this  here,  to  those  who  are  not  and  who 
will  not  be  politicians  ?  Because  I  honor  you  who  all  the 
way  from  one  to  twenty  years  have  been  teaching  children 


330  ESSAYS  AND  ADDBESSES. 

liow  to  think.  Because  I  know  that  in  the  humblest  school- 
room where  3^ou  teach  j^ou  cannot  give  the  j-oungest  child 
the  most  rudimentary  idea  of  independent  thinking,  that 
he  is  neither  to  accept  things  because  everybody  says 
them,  nor  to  deny  tilings  because  everybody  says  them — 
you  cannot  sow  the  seeds  of  bright,  brave  thinking  in  any 
young-  mind,  but  the  whole  country  is  the  better  for  it. 
For  intellectual  bravery,  big  though  the  name  be,  may  be 
taught  in  the  kindergarten,  and  the  higher  j-ou  go  in 
public  life  the  more  you  need  its  influence  and  feel  its 
loss, 

I  am  speaking  to  scholars,  to  those  who  read  books,  per- 
haps to  those  who  sometimes  vn-ite  them.  Permit  me, 
then,  to  speak  of  another  field  in  which  the  courage  of 
thought  is  needed — the  field  of  letters.  There  is  such  a 
thing  as  literary  courage.  Here,  again,  we  perhaps  find 
the  thing  best  by  noting  its  deficiencies.  We  learn  what 
the  courage  is  which  is  wanting  by  seeing  the  cowardice 
which  abounds.  Who  is  there  that  reads  many  books 
or  that  hears  much  tallvi  about  books  without  seeing  that 
writers  and  critics  both  are  governed  l)y  other  people,  not 
by  themselves  ?  The  author  is  "vvi'iting  what  he  thinks 
other  peoi^le  want.  The  critic  is  praising  what  he  thinks 
other  j)eople  like.  Here  again  both  kinds  of  slavery  oc- 
cur, the  compliant  and  the  defiant.  There  is  the  author 
who  writes  to  satisfy  the  public  taste,  and  the  critic  who 
flings  his  decisions  right  in  the  face  of  the  public  judg- 
ment. In  both  alike  conventionality  is  master.  There 
was  never  any  great  book  made  in  either  way.  The  true 
literary  courage  consists  in  a  man's  saying  what  he  has  to 
say  in  such  style  as  he  believes  best  fitted  to  its  character 
— not  saying  it  because  it  is  popular,  certainly  not  saying 
it  because  it  is  unpopular,  but  saying  it  because  it  is  true, 
and  saying  it  as  he  think;s  that  special  truth  needs  to  be 
said.     Does  that  seem  very  simple  and  commonplace  ?     If 


COURAGE.  331 

it  seems  so  to  you,  just  think  over  tlie  books  that  come 
hurrying  from  the  press.  What  was  the  purpose  of  that 
novel  ?  Why  should  it  have  been  written  at  all,  and  who 
made  the  stilts  on  which  this  lofty  and  conceited  style 
strides  on  from  page  to  page  ?  What  set  that  cynic  snarl- 
ing through  his  long  lines  of  captious  rhyme?  Every- 
where the  stamp  of  some  false  standards  is  on  the  short- 
lived things.  They  creej)  along  the  shores  and  hold  on 
b}'  the  timid  sides  of  conventionality.  How  seldom  comes 
a  book  that  with  broad  freedom  strikes  out  like  a  swim- 
mer and  neither  di'ifts  with  the  waves  nor  buffets  them 
for  their  own  sake,  but  strikes  across  them  to  a  worthy 
and  absorbing  purpose.  Then  turn  to  Shakespeare,  Mil- 
ton, Wordsworth,  and  you  know  the  difference.  There 
is  courage.  Those  men  wrote  their  truth  in  their  truth's 
own  best  way.  Matter  and  manner  both  were  theirs. 
ISTo  man  but  they  was  at  their  work.  Therefore  we  have 
"  Hamlet,"  and  ''  Paradise  Lost,"  and  "  The  Excm'sion." 

Not  tliat  a  man  must  be  regardless  of  his  age  and  of 
the  circumstances  about  him  in  order  to  have  real  cour- 
age. The  boldest  swimmer,  he  who  is  most  determined 
to  master  the  current  and  not  drift  with  it,  will  be  the 
ver}^  man  to  study  it  most  closel}- .  You  must  know  your 
servant  even  more  than  you  need  to  know  your  master. 
One  of  the  most  subtle  and  interesting  of  all  studies  in 
literature  is  to  see  tlie  delicacy  and  vigor  of  the  relation- 
ship that  exists  between  e^^ery  really  gi'eat  writer  and 
the  age  he  lives  in.  Shakespeare,  Milton,  Drjalen,  Words- 
worth, Tennyson,  they  are  all  specimens  of  this,  of  the 
way  in  which  a  really  great  man  gets  from  his  time  its 
influence,  assumes  its  character,  writes  in  it  as  he  never 
could  have  wi'itten  in  any  other  time  than  that,  and  yet  is 
never  overcome  by  its  timidities.  This  is  the  difference 
of  the  great  and  little  writers  of  any  age,  just  as  it  is  the 
difference  between  the  large  and  little  lives  in  any  society. 


832  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

A  large  man  lives  in  a  social  system  and  is  helped  by  all 
its  spiiit.  A  little  man  lives  in  tlie  same  system  and  is 
always  afraid  of  violating  its  letter.  So  a  brave  author 
moves  with  his  time  and  is  inspired  by  it,  while  a  tunid 
author  lies  under  his  time  and  is  crushed  by  it. 

I  am  siu*e  that  the  habit  of  review-reading  is  hostile 
to  literary  com^age.  To  read  what  some  man,  a  critic  by 
profession,  has  said  about  a  great  live  book,  this,  which  is 
so  often  recommended  to  our  young  people,  and  which  we 
are  all  so  jubilant  o^^er  as  a  splendid  way  of  saving  labor, 
is  probably  as  unstimulating  and  unfertilizing  a  process 
as  the  human  mind  can  submit  to.  It  makes  the  judg- 
ments technical  and  formal.  It  sets  us  all  to  wTiting 
books  or  judging  of  them  with  reference  to  other  books 
that  have  been  already  written  and  judged,  not  with  im- 
mediate reference  to  truths  and  thoughts.  To  the  passion 
for  review-writing  and  review-reading  which  has  possessed 
our  time,  belongs,  partly  as  cause,  but  more  largely  as 
effect,  the  critical  and  captious  temper  w^hich  is  all  around 
us,  and  of  which  many  of  us  are  so  wonderfully  proiid. 
No ;  read  books  themselves,  and  not  men's  talk  about 
them.  To  read  a  book  is  to  make  a  friend.  To  read  a 
review  is  to  be  introduced  to  a  passing  stranger.  Better 
one  good  book  read  in  a' year  than  all  the  torrent  of  re- 
viev/s  that  roU  on  endlessly  from  month  to  month.  In 
the  book,  if  it  is  worth  your  reading,  you  meet  a  man — 
you  go  away  full  of  his  spirit — if  there  is  anything  in  you 
he  will  quicken  it.  In  the  review  you  meet  a  system. 
The  book  makes  you  brave  and  full  of  courageous  and 
ambitious  independence.  The  review  makes  you  timid 
and  afraid  of  blunders.  To  make  a  cordial  sympathy 
between  their  scholars  and  good  books,  to  make  young 
people  know  the  souls  of  books  and  find  their  own  souls 
in  knowing  them,  that  is  the  only  way  to  cultivate  their 
Uterary  courage,  and  that  it  is  the  joy  of  eveiy  teacher 


COUBAGE.  333 

who  has  flesh,  Hood,  and  a  soul  to  do.  O  teachers,  find 
this  courage  for  yourselves,  that  yom*  scholars  may  not 
be  cowards  where  it  is  most  of  all  needful  for  students  to 
be  brave. 

I  have  spoken  to  you,  then,  of  courage.  It  is  one  and 
the  same  thing  everywhere.  The  firmness  with  which 
one  stands  upon  the  hopeless  deck  before  the  doomed  ship 
goes  down,  the  persistency  with  which  a  man  claims  that 
the  right  is  best  whatever  voices  clamor  for  the  wrong, 
the  intelligence  with  which  you  think  your  own  thought 
straight  through  the  confusion  of  other  thinking  men,  the 
independence  of  the  conscientious  politician,  the  delight 
of  the  writer  in  doing  his  own  work,  of  the  reader  in  form- 
ing his  o^\n  judgments,  they  are  all  at  their  root  one  and 
the  same  thing.  One  gracious  and  another  stern,  they  are 
all  made  up,  like  the  black  coal  and  the  sparkling  dia- 
m.ond,  of  the  same  constituents.  Let  me  recount  in  brief 
what  those  constituents  are. 

First  of  all,  there  is  the  power  of  being  mastered  by  and 
possessed  with  an  idea.  How  rare  it  is !  I  do  not  say  how 
few  men  are  so  mastered  and  possessed :  I  say  how  few  men 
have  the  power  so  to  be.  The  fine  and  simple  capacity  for 
it  which  belongs  to  youth  being  once  lost,  how  few  men  ever 
attain  the  culture  by  which  it  is  renewed.  But  without  it 
there  can  be  no  courage.  Without  some  end  set  clear  before 
you,  what  chance  is  there  that  you  can  shoot  your  arrow 
strong  and  straight  ?  It  does  not  need  that  you  should  be 
blind  to  all  the  difficulties  that  lie  between.  Recklessness  is 
no  part  of  courage.  When  Cromwell  and  his  men  gave  the 
sublime  pietui'e  of  heroic  coui'age  which  illuminates  Eng- 
lish history,  it  was  not  that  they  undervalued  the  enor- 
mous strength  of  what  they  fought  against ;  it  was  that 
they  saw  righteousness  and  freedom  shining  out  beyond, 
and  moved  toAvard  their  fascinating  presence  irresistibly. 
Courage,  like  every  other  good  thing,  must  be  positive, 


334  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

not  negative.  If  the  college  president  coiirageonsly  makes 
his  college  fresh  and  strong,  it  is  not  that  he  does  not  see 
the  strength  of  old  inertia,  but  he  sees  the  ideal  and  the 
possibility  of  the  true  college  blazing  beyond  it  all.  So 
train  your  children  to  be  capable  of  the  doniiniou  of  ideas. 
As  you  build  a  house  for  its  inmate,  so  build  their  minds 
for  princij)les.  Even  before  the  idea  comes,  t;each  them 
that  it  is  coming,  and  so  make  them  expect  their  true 
master. 

And  to  do  tliis  there  must  be,  in  the  second  place,  a 
freedom  from  self-cousciousness.  Self -consciousness  is 
at  the  root  of  every  cowardice.  To  think  about  one's 
self  is  death  to  real  thought  about  any  noble  thing.  Let 
me  quote  you  a  famous  old  story  which  seems  a  parable  : 
''  The  beautiful  Lady  Diana  Rich,  daughter  of  the  Earl  of 
Holland,  as  she  was  w^alking  in  the  garden  at  Kensington 
before  dinner,  met  with  her  own  apparition,  habit  and 
everything,  as  in  a  looking-glass.  About  a  month  after, 
she  died  of  the  smallpox.  And  'tis  said  that  her  sister, 
the  Lady  Isabella,  saw  the  like  of  lierseK  also  before  she 
died.  A  third  sister,  Mary,  was  married  to  the  first  Earl 
of  Breadalbane,  and  it  is  recorded  that  she  also,  not  long 
after  her  marriage,  had  some  such  warning  of  her  ap- 
proaching dissolution."  Such  is  the  old  tradition  of  the 
house  of  Holland,  Is  it  not  a  parable  ?  Does  not  he  who 
sees  himself  die?  Does  not  the  mind  that  dwells  upon 
itself  lose  just  that  fine  and  lofty  power  of  being  mastered 
by  a  principle  ?  The  most  courageous  men  I  ever  knew, 
if  they  were  marked  by  any  one  thing  were  marked  by 
this,  that  they  forgot  themselves,  that  they  were  free  fi-om 
self-consciousness.  So  no  clinging  garments  of  their  self- 
hood hindered  them  in  running  to  the  goal. 

And  there  is  one  thing  more,  which  is  simijlicity.  The 
elaborateness  of  life  makes  cowards  of  us.  It  is  not  the 
bigness  of  the  sea,  but  the  many  mouths  with  which  it 


COURAGE.  335 

mocks  liis  feebleness,  that  makes  the  strong  swimmer 
grow  afraid  and  sink.  We  want  to  find  some  one  thing 
which  we  are  sure  of,  and  tie  our  lives  to  that,  stand 
strong  on  it  to  buffet  off  our  fears.  When  Hannibal  was 
besieging  Rome,  some  man  in  the  besieged  city  gave  cour- 
age to  the  rest  by  purchasing  for  a  large  sum  the  plot  of 
ground  outside  the  walls  on  which  the  tent  of  the  invad- 
ing general  was  pitched.  It  was  a  brave  deed.  He  be- 
lieved in  Rome.  That  one  thing  he  was  sure  of.  With 
dogged  obstinacy  he  believed  that  Rome  w^ould  conquer. 
Some  one  sure  thing,  made  sure  of  early  in  our  life,  kept 
clear  through  all  obscurity — that  is  what  keeps  life  sim- 
ple, that  is  what  keeps  it  fresh  and  never  lets  its  bravery 
go  out. 

To  be  able  to  obey  ideas,  to  be  free  from  self-conscious- 
ness, to  be  simple — these  ai-e  the  secrets  of  courage. 

Teachers,  it  is  your  privilege  to  live  a  life  where  all 
these  elements  of  courage  may  be  most  richly  cultivated. 
It  is  our  lot,  0  fellow-teachers,  to  live  a  life  where  all  these 
elements  of  courage  are  most  in  danger.  Danger  and 
chance  together  make  the  richest  life.  The  highest  moun- 
tain-top is  that  which  wears  as  a  coronet  the  clouds  through 
which  it  has  to  pierce.  Quern  nuhila  victa  coronat.  I  re- 
joice with  you  upon  what  you  know  better  than  I  do,  the 
need  and  the  culture  of  courage  in  the  teacher's  hard  and 
useful  life. 


ADDRESS    AT    THE    DEDICATION    OF    PUBLIC 

LATIN  AND  ENGLISH  HIGH  SCHOOL-HOUSE, 

BOSTON,  MASS.,  FEBRUARY  22,  1881. 

I  SHOULD  be  very  sorry,  sir,  at  tliis  late  hour,  to  under- 
take to  treat  of  the  relations  of  religion  to  science.  I 
lieard,  several  hours  ago  in  this  meeting,  some  excellent 
remarks  that  were  made  upon  that  subject,  and  I  think  I 
must  leave  to  the  thoughtfulness  of  this  great  assembly 
the  garnering  up  of  the  noble  and  wise  things  that  were 
said  to  us  by  the  principal  of  the  Latin  School. 

I  want  to  speak  only  a  few  moments,  if  I  can  restrain 
myself  so.  It  is  all  very  well  to  talk  about  the  magnifi- 
cence of  this  new  building.  It  is  magnificent — and  we 
are  thankful  for  it ;  but  to  me  there  is  something  infinitely 
sad  and  pathetic  this  morning  in  thinking  of  our  old  Latin 
and  English  High  School-house  standing  empty  and  deso- 
late down  in  Bedford  Street.  I  cannot  get  it  out  of  my 
mind.  I  cannot,  as  I  look  around  iipon  the  brilliancy  of 
this  new  building,  forget  what  that  old  building  has  done. 
I  cainiot  help  thinking  of  it  almost  as  a  person,  and  won- 
dering if  it  hears  what  we  are  saying  here.  I  cannot  help 
thiidving  that  from  the  top  of  the  old  brown  cupola  it 
looks  across  the  length  of  the  city  and  sees  the  pinnacles 
of  this  new  temple  which  is  to  take  its  place.  I  cannot 
help  thinking  that,  even  through  its  closed  and  dusty 
windows,  it  is  hearing  something  of  the  triumphant  shouts 
with  which  its  successor's  walls  are  ringing.  I  canjiot 
help  wondering  what  it  thinks  about  it  all. 

336 


BOSTON  LATIN  AND  ENGLISH  HIGH  SCHOOL.     o37 

But  when  I  know,  letting  tliat  old  scliool-lionse  stand 
before  me  foi*  a  moment  in  personal  shape — when  I  know 
what  a  dear  and  earnest  old  creature  it  was,  when  I  know 
how  carefully  it  looked  after  those  who  came  into  its  cul- 
ture and  embrace,  when  I  know  how  many  of  us  will 
always  look  back  to  it,  through  the  whole  course  of  our 
lives,  as  the  place  where  were  gathered  some  of  the  deep- 
est inspirations  that  ever  came  to  us,  I  cannot  but  think 
that  tlie  old  school  is  noble  enough  and  generous  enough 
to  look  with  joy  and  satisfaction  upon  this  new  build- 
ing that  has  risen  to  take  its  place.  And  as  the  old  year 
kindly  and  ungrudgingly  sinks  back  into  the  generations 
of  the  past,  and  allows  the  new  year  to  come  in  with  its 
new  activities,  and  as  the  father  steps  aside  and  sees  the 
son  who  bears  his  nature,  and  whom  he  has  taught  the 
best  he  knows,  come  forth  into  life  and  till  his  place,  so  I 
am  willing  to  believe  that  the  old  school  rejoices  in  this,  its 
great  successor,  and  that  it  is  thinking  (if  it  has  thoughts) 
of  its  own  useful  career,  and  congratulating  itself  upon 
the  earnest  and  faithful  way  in  which  it  has  pursued,  not 
only  the  special  metlwds  of  knowledge  which  have  belonged 
to  its  time,  but  the  lynrposes  of  knowledge,  which  belong 
to  all  time,  and  must  pass  from  school-house  to  school- 
house,  and  from  age  to  age,  unchanged. 

The  i^erpetuity  of  knowledge  is  in  the  perpetuity  of  the 
purposes  of  knowledge.  The  thing  which  links  this  school- 
house  with  all  the  school-houses  of  the  generations  of  the 
past — the  thing  that  links  together  the  great  schools  of 
the  middle  ages,  and  the  schools  of  old  Greece,  and  the 
schools  of  the  Hebrews,  where  the  youth  of  that  time  were 
found  sitting  at  the  feet  of  their  wise  rabl^is — is  the  per- 
petual identit}^  of  the  moral  purposes  of  knowledge.  The 
methods  of  knowledge  are  constantly  changing.  The 
school-books  that  were  studied  ten,  twenty,  thirty  3'ears 
ago  have  passed  out  of  date ;  the  scholars  of  to-day  do  not 


33S  ESSAYS  AND   ADDBESSES. 

even  know  their  names ;  bnt  the  purpose  for  which  onr 
school-books  are  studied,  the  things  we  are  trying  to  get 
out  of  them,  the  things  which,  if  they  are  properly  taught 
and  studied,  the  scholars  of  to-day  do  get  out  of  them, 
are  the  same  ;  and  so  across  the  years  we  clasp  hands  with 
our  own  school-boy  days. 

And  there  is  to  be  the  perpetuity  of  knowledge  in  the 
future.  One  wonders,  as  he  looks  around  this  new  school- 
house,  what  is  to  be  taught  here  in  the  years  to  come.  He 
is  sure  that  the  books  will  change,  that  tlie  sciences  will 
change,  that  new  studies  will  be  developed,  that  new 
methods  of  interpretation  will  be  discovered,  that  new 
kingdoms  of  the  infinite  knowledge  are  to  be  opened  to 
the  discerning  eye  of  man,  in  the  years  that  are  to  come. 
He  knows  it  is  impossible  for  any  man  to  say  what  will 
be  taught  in  these  halls  a  hundred  j^ears  hence ;  but  yet, 
with  that  unknown  development  he  is  in  deep  sympathy, 
because  he  knows  that  the  boys  of  a  hundred  years  hence, 
like  the  bo\s  of  to-day,  will  he  taught  here  to  be  faith- 
ful to  the  deep  purposes  of  knowledge,  will  be  trained  to 
conscientious  study,  to  the  love  of  kuowledge,  to  justice 
and  generosity,  to  respect  for  themselves,  and  obedience 
to  authority,  and  honor  for  man,  and  reverence  for  God. 
That  is  the  link  iDctween  the  school-house  that  stood  be- 
hind the  King's  Chapel  and  this;  and  that  is  the  only 
thing  that  in  the  years  to  come  wiU  make  these  schools 
truly  the  same  schools  that  they  are  to-day. 

When  the  Duke  of  Wellington  came  back  to  Eton  after 
his  glorious  career,  as  he  was  walking  through  the  old 
quadrangle  he  looked  around  and  said,  "  Here  is  where  I 
learned  the  lessons  that  made  it  possible  for  me  to  con- 
quer at  Waterloo."  It  was  not  what  he  had  read  there  in 
books,  not  what  he  had  learned  there  by  -s^Titing  Greek 
verses,  or  by  scanning  the  lines  of  Virgil  or  Horace,  that 
helped  him  win  his  great  battle  ;  but  there  he  had  learned 


BOSTOX  LATIX  AND  ENGLISH  HIGH  SCHOOL.     339 

to  be  faithful  to  present  duty,  to  be  stroug,  to  be  diligent, 
to  be  patient,  and  that  was  why  he  was  able  to  say  that  it 
was  what  he  had  learned  at  Eton  that  had  made  it  possible 
for  him  to  conquer  at  Waterloo. 

And  the  same  thing-  made  it  possible  for  the  Latin  and 
High  School  boys  to  helj)  win  the  victory  which  came  at 
Gettysburg,  and  under  the  ver}^  walls  of  Richmond.  It 
was  the  lessons  which  they  had  learned  here.  It  was  not 
simply  the  lessons  which  they  had  learned  out  of  books ;  it 
was  the  grand  imj^rint  of  character  that  had  been  given 
to  them  here.  The  Mohammedan  says,  "  The  ink  of  the 
learned  is  as  precious  as  the  blood  of  the  martyrs."  Our 
English  High  School  and  our  Latin  School  have  had  "  the 
ink  of  the  learned"  and  '-the  blood  of  the  martyrs"  too. 
They  have  sent  forth  young  men  who  have  added  to  the, 
world's  wisdom  and  to  its  vast  dissemination ;  they  have 
sent  forth  young  men  who  have  laid  down  their  lives  that 
the  country  might  be  perpetual,  and  that  slavery  might 
die. 

I  have  always  remembered — it  seemed  but  a  passing- 
impression  at  the  moment,  but  it  has  never  left  me — how 
one  day,  when  I  was  going  home  from  the  old  Adams 
School  in  Mason  Street,  I  saw  a  little  group  of  people 
gathered  down  in  Bedford  Street ;  and,  with  a  boy's  curi- 
osity, I  went  into  the  crowd,  and  peeped  around  among 
tlie  big  men  who  were  in  my  way  to  see  what  they  were 
doing.  I  found  that  they  were  laying  the  corner-stone  of 
a  new  school-house.  I  always  felt,  after  that,  when  I  was 
a  scholar  and  a  teacher  there,  and  ever  since,  that  I  had  a 
little  more  right  in  that  school-house  because  I  had  hap- 
pened, by  that  accident  of  passing  home  that  way  that  day 
from  school,  to  see  its  corner-stone  laid.  I  wish  that  every 
boy  in  the  Latin  School  and  High  School,  and  every  boy 
in  Boston  who  is  old  enougli  to  be  here,  who  is  ever  going 
to  be  in  these  schools,  could  be  here  to-day.     I  hope  they 


?A0  ESSAYS  AXD   JDDEESSES. 

will  hear,  in  some  way  or  otlier,  throngli  the  echoes  that 
will  reach  them  from  this  audience,  with  what  solemn  and 
devout  feeling  we  have  here  consecrated  this  building  to 
the  purposes  which  the  old  building  so  nobly  served,  and 
in  the  ser\dng  of  which  it  became  so  dear  to  us  all :  to  the 
preservation  of  sound  learning,  the  cultivation  of  manly 
character,  and  the  faithful  service  of  the  dear  country,  in 
whatever  untold  exigencies  there  may  be  in  the  years  to 
come,  in  which  she  will  demand  the  service  of  her  sons. 


DEAN   STANLEY. 

{Atlantic  Monthly,  October,  18S1.) 

When  Dean  Stanley,  on  tlie  IStli  of  July,  was  drawing 
near  his  deatli,  he  asked  that  his  hrother-in-law  and  life- 
long friend,  Dr.  Vaughan,  might  preach  his  funeral  sermon 
in  Westminster  Abbey,  "  because,"  said  he,  "  he  has  known 
me  longest."  He  chose  the  friend  who  had  knoAvn  him 
all  his  life  to  speak  of  him.  There  was  nothing  in  all 
that  life  which  he  would  have  concealed ;  and  he  knew 
that  it  was  oidy  as  that  life  was  treated  as  a  whole,  and 
its  continual  characteristics  sui'veyed  in  their  develop- 
ment from  boyhood  to  the  mature  age  in  which  he  then 
lay  dying,  that  he  could  l)e  fifty  understood. 

This,  which  is  true  of  all  men,  was  sj)ecially  true  of 
Dean  Stanley.  When  he  came  to  America,  in  1878,  he 
was  wholly  taken  by  surprise  by  the  welcome  with  which 
he  was  received.  His  friends  themselves  were  unj^repared 
for  any  such  enthusiastic  interest  in  one  who  was  known 
only  as  a  writer  of  books  and  as  an  ecclesiastic  of  a  for- 
eign establishment.  Men  and  women  of  all  classes  seemed 
to  greet  him  as  if  he  were  their  friend.  It  must  liave  meant 
that  in  his  books  there  was  that  power,  which  not  many 
books  possess,  of  making  those  who  read  them  know  their 
author  as  a  man — of  making  his  personal  life  and  charac- 
ter real  and  vivid  to  them.  Therefore,  they  thronged  the 
churches  where  he  preached,  and  even  the  streets  in  which 
he  walked,  not  merely  to  hear  his  words,  but  to  see  him. 

And  there  can  be  no  doubt  as  to  what  was  the  personal 

341 


342  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

impression  wliicli  men  had  of  him.  Ten  years  ago  a  wise 
writer  in  the  Conteinpovari)  Rerieiv  said,  "  If  we  were  to 
attempt  a  description  of  Dean  Stanley's  characteristics, 
we  shonld  name  first  and  chief  of  all  his  intense  love  for 
the  light."  That  word  describes  the  passion  of  his  life. 
The  insatiable  cnriosity,  the  eagerness  to  acqnire  and  to 
impart  intelligent  conceptions,  accompanied  by  an  abso- 
lute moral  clearness,  a  wonderful  single-mindedness,  and 
a  sympathy  and  fairness  which  never  failed — these,  which 
are  the  elements  in  which  light  lives  and  grows,  were 
what  we  all  delighted  to  discover  in  him  while  he  Uved, 
and  what  we  delight  to  remember  now  that  he  is  gone. 
His  living  and  learning  and  working  was  like  the  shining 
of  a  star.  "It  is  no  task  for  stars  to  shine,"  and  so  with 
him  all  that  he  did  seemed  eas}^,  as  if  it  were  but  the 
natural  and  spontaneous  utterance  of  what  he  was,  the 
effortless  radiance  of  a  nature  which  was  made  to  gather 
and  to  utter  light.  Intelligence  shone  in  the  refined  alert- 
ness of  his  face — which,  by  the  way,  has  never  found  sucli 
good  representation  as  in  some  of  the  photographs  that 
were  taken  in  America.  His  style  had  a  crystal  clearness, 
Avhich  showed  his  thought  distinctly.  His  very  walk  was 
quick  and  eager,  as  if  he  must  find  what  he  sought.  It  is 
no  wonder  that  many  men  have  instantly  applied  to  him 
Matthew  Arnold's  famous  phrase,  "sweetness  and  light." 
And  the  Spectator  could  use  of  him  an  expression  which 
would  l)e  ridiculous  if  it  Avere  used  of  almost  any  other 
pulilio  man,  and  declare  that  his  death  "leaves  the  public 
with  a  sense  of  having  lost  something  rare  and  sweet." 

In  due  time  there  must  come  a  Life  of  Stanley  which, 
if  it  be  wortliily  written,  will  be  one  of  the  richest  records 
of  the  best  life  of  our  century,  and  one  of  the  most  attrac- 
tive pictures  of  a  human  life  in  any  time.  His  large  asso- 
ciations and  continual  activity  and  ceaseless  correspon- 
dence must  have  left  most  precious  materials  for  such  a 


DEAN  STANLEY.  343 

book.  If  there  were  only  another  Stanley  left  to  write  it ! 
Let  us  here  recall  its  simplest  outline.  He  was  born,  as 
he  used  to  love  to  recall,  in  1815,  the  year  of  Waterloo, 
and  received  his  name  of  Arthur  from  the  great  duke  of 
whose  renown  all  England  then  was  full.  His  father  was 
the  brave  and  clear-sighted  Bishop  of  Norwich,  who  stood 
with  Whately  in  the  House  of  Lords  when  one  of  the  first 
petitions  was  presented  on  the  subject  of  subscription, 
who  was  the  friend  of  Arnold  and  asked  him  to  preach  his 
consecration  sermon,  and  whose  life  his  son  has  written 
with  a  son's  affection  and  the  admiration  of  a  kindred 
soul.  To  his  mother  Arthur  Stanley  dedicated  his  "Jewish 
Church,"  in  recollection  of  "  lier  firm  faith,  calm  wisdom, 
and  tender  S3'mpatliy " ;  and  of  her,  too,  he  has  written 
delightfully  in  the  same  volume  that  portrays  his  father's 
life.  When  he  was  fourteen  years  old,  in  1829,  he  went 
to  Rugby,  and  was  one  of  the  first  pupils  of  his  father's 
friend.  His  "  Life  of  Dr.  Arnold,"  which  is  perhaps  the 
liest  biography  of  our  time,  is  the  truest  record  of  what 
Rugby  was  to  him.  There  is  one  passage  in  it  which,  as 
we  read  it,  still  lets  us  see  the  boy  sitting  beneath  that 
pulpit  in  the  Rugby  chapel,  with  his  eyes  fixed  upon  the 
teacher,  and  gathering  into  his  open  heart  "an  image  of 
high  principle  and  feeling,"  which  found  in  him  a  true 
mirror  and  was  never  blotted  out.  In  1834,  when  he  was 
nineteen  years  old,  Stanley  went  to  Oxford,  and  there 
spent  four  3^ears  in  the  midst  of  the  intense  religious 
excitement  of  those  days.  He  went  forth  from  his  student 
life  laden  with  the  honors  and  prizes  of  the  university. 
Then  he  became  a  fellow  and  tutor.  Later  he  was  made 
the  secretary  of  the  Oxford  University  Commission.  In 
1845  he  was  chosen  to  be  select  preacher  to  the  university. 
Five  years  later  he  became  a  canon  of  Canterbury  Cathe- 
dral, and  in  1852  he  made  the  journey  to  the  East,  the 
record  of  which  is  in  the  glowing  pages  of  his  "  Sinai  and 


344  ESSJTS  AXD   JDDEESSES. 

Palestine."  In  1853  lie  was  appointed  Regius  professor 
of  ecclesiastical  history  at  Oxford,  and  to  his  labors  in 
that  chair  we  owe  the  "  Lectures  on  the  Jewish  Church  " 
and  the  "Lectures  on  the  Eastern  Church,"  which  have 
opened  the  doors  of  the  Old  Testament  and  of  the  early 
Church  to  hosts  of  readers.  In  1862  he  went  to  Palestine 
again  with  the  Prince  of  Wales,  and  the  "  Sermons  in  the 
East"  recount  the  lessons  of  that  journey.  In  1863  he 
was  made  Dean  of  Westminster,  and  began  to  wear  that 
title  by  which  he  will  always  be  best  known — the  titb 
which  he  loved  above  all  others. 

It  was  a  bright  and  happy  life.  And  it  was  constantly 
productive.  Besides  the  books  already  named,  there  were 
piiblished  in  1847  the  "  Sermons  and  Essa^-s  on  the  Apos- 
tolic Age  " ;  in  1855,  the  "  Commentary  on  the  Epistles  to 
the  Corinthians " ;  in  the  same  year,  the  "  Historical 
Memorials  of  Canterbury  "  ;  in  1867,  the  "  Historical  Me- 
morials of  Westminster  Abbey"  ;  in  1870,  the  "Essays  on 
Church  and  State,"  which  has  been  well  described  as  "  the 
epic  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War  in  the  Church  of  England  " ; 
and  in  1877  "  Lectures  on  the  Church  of  Scotland,"  which, 
as  Bishop  Ewing  wrote,  "  show  a  marvelous  acquaintance 
with  Scotch  facts  and  their  bearings."  And  last  of  all 
there  was  his  most  interesting  volume  on  "'  Christian  In- 
stitutions," which  was  hardly  issued  when  he  died.  These 
marked  the  great  current  of  his  life  and  study.  And 
around  them,  no  less  characteristic  and  full  of  his  char- 
acter and  spirit,  like  sj^ray  flung  up  b}^  the  impetuous  aud 
eager  stream,  there  gathered  a  cloud  of  lectures,  sermons, 
reviews,  and  articles  of  every  kind,  bearing  perpetual  wit- 
ness to  the  activity  of  his  mind,  the  wide  range  of  his 
learning,  and  the  quickness  of  his  sympathy  with  life. 

And  now,  what  were  his  characteristics  as  they  were 
indicated  in  this  life  and  w^ork  ?  First  of  aU,  as  we  have 
said,  there  was  the  love  of  light.     No  man  ever  loved 


COURAGE.  329 

acts  of  public  men.  But  it  is  cowardice.  It  is  the  dis- 
position of  one  part  of  our  people  to  fall  in  with  current 
ways  of  working,  to  run  witli  the  mass,  and  of  another 
part  to  rush  headlong-  into  this  or  that  new  scheme  or 
policy  of  opposition  merely  to  escape  the  stigma  of  con- 
servatism. Neither  the  conservative  nor  the  radical  has 
the  monopoly  of  cowardice.  Neither  timidity  nor  reckless- 
ness is  really  brave.  No  man  on  any  side  is  truly  brave 
in  thought  Avho  is  listening  for  other  people's  voices  either 
to  assent  to  or  to  contradict  them. 

There  is  a  class  among  us,  a  growing  class,  I  think — a 
class  Avliich  all  our  educational  machinery  ought  to  do 
much  to  increase — which,  not  standing  aloof  from  demo- 
ci-atic  life  and  hating  our  institutions,  but  thoroughly  a 
part  of  them,  thoroughly  believing  in  them,  still  is  deter- 
mined to  think  freely.  Our  education  is  missing  its  best 
work  unless  it  ij3  furnishing  to  those  whom  it  trains  just 
snch  strong  standing-ground  in  the  midst  of  our  popu- 
lar turmoil — a  ground  where  man  may  stand  and  see  the 
power  of  the  people  and  yet  not  jdeld  up  his  judgment  to 
them,  see  the  folly  of  the  people  and  yet  not  be  driven 
into  contempt  of  them,  but  think  his  own  thought  still 
aud  bring  the  results  of  his  independent  thinking  to  cor- 
roborate or  to  correct  the  chance  judgments  of  the  caucus 
or  the  street.  The  thorough-going  partisan  and  the  bitter, 
captious  cynic  are  both  cowards.  The  loud  and  indiscrim- 
inate applause  of  one,  the  other's  miserable  sneer,  both  are 
contemptible  beside  the  open,  sympathetic  thoughtfulness 
of  the  man  who  believes  in  his  country'  but  thinks  for  him- 
self, and  so  is  always  bringing  an  intelligent  disagree- 
ment or  an  intelligent  assent  as  a  real  contribution  to  his 
country's  policy. 

Why  do  I  say  this  here,  to  those  who  are  not  and  who 
will  not  be  politicians  °?  Because  I  honor  you  who  all  the 
way  from  one  to  twenty  years  have  been  teaching  children 


330  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

liow  to  think.  Because  I  know  that  in  the  humblest  school- 
room where  you  teach  you  cannot  give  the  youngest  cliild 
the  most  rudimentary  idea  of  independent  thinking,  that 
he  is  neither  to  accept  things  because  everybody  says 
them,  nor  to  deny  things  because  everybody  says  them — 
3'ou  cannot  sow  the  seeds  of  loright,  lirave  thinking  in  any 
young  mind,  but  the  whole  country  is  the  better  for  it. 
For  intellectual  bravery,  big  though  the  name  be,  may  be 
taught  in  the  kindergarten,  and  the  higher  you  go  in 
public  life  the  more  you  need  its  influence  and  feel  its 
loss. 

I  am  speaking  to  scholars,  to  those  who  read  books,  per- 
haps to  those  who  sometimes  write  them.  Permit  me, 
then,  to  speak  of  another  field  in  which  the  courage  of 
thought  is  needed — the  field  of  letters.  There  is  such  a 
thing  as  literary  courage.  Here,  again,  we  perhaps  find 
the  thing  best  by  noting  its  deficiencies.  We  learn  what 
the  courage  is  which  is  wanting  by  seeing  the  cowardice 
which  abounds.  Who  is  there  that  reads  many  books 
or  that  hears  much  tallv  about  books  without  seeing  that 
writers  and  critics  both  are  governed  by  other  people,  not 
by  themselves  ?  The  author  is  wa-iting  what  he  thinks 
other  people  want.  The  critic  is  praising  what  he  thinks 
other  people  like.  Here  again  botli  kinds  of  slavery  oc- 
cur, the  compliant  and  the  defiant.  There  is  the  author 
who  writes  to  satisfy  the  public  taste,  and  the  critic  who 
flings  his  decisions  right  in  the  face  of  tlie  public  judg- 
ment. In  both  alike  conventionality  is  master.  There 
was  never  any  great  book  made  in  either  way.  Tlie  true 
literary  courage  consists  in  a  man's  saying  what  he  has  to 
say  in  such  style  as  he  believes  best  fitted  to  its  character 
— not  sa3dng  it  because  it  is  popular,  certainly  not  sajdng 
it  because  it  is  unpopular,  but  saying  it  because  it  is  true, 
and  snyiug  it  as  he  think:s  that  special  truth  needs  to  be 
said.     Does  that  seem  very  simple  and  commonplace  ?     If 


COURAGE.  331 

it  seems  so  to  you,  just  tliiuk  over  the  books  that  come 
hiuTyiug  from  the  press.  What  was  the  purpose  of  that 
novel  ?  Why  should  it  have  been  written  at  all,  and  who 
made  the  stilts  on  which  this  lofty  and  conceited  style 
strides  on  from  page  to  j)age  ?  What  set  that  cynic  snarl- 
ing through  his  long  lines  of  captious  rhyme?  Every- 
where the  stamp  of  some  false  standards  is  on  the  short- 
lived things.  They  creep  along  the  shores  and  hold  on 
by  the  timid  sides  of  convention aht}^  How  seldom  comes 
a  book  that  with  broad  freedom  strikes  out  like  a  swim- 
mer and  neither  drifts  with  the  waves  nor  buffets  them 
for  their  own  sake,  but  strikes  across  them  to  a  worthy 
and  absorbing  purpose.  Then  turn  to  Shakespeare,  Mil- 
ton, Wordsworth,  and  you  know  the  difference.  There 
is  couragei  Those  men  wrote  their  truth  in  their  truth's 
own  best  way.  Matter  and  manner  both  were  theirs. 
No  man  but  they  was  at  their  work.  Therefore  we  have 
"Hamlet,"  and  "Paradise  Lost,"  and  "The  Excursion." 

Not  that  a  man  must  be  regardless  of  his  age  and  of 
the  circumstances  about  him  in  order  to  have  real  cour- 
age. The  boldest  swimmer,  he  who  is  most  determined 
to  master  the  current  and  not  drift  with  it,  will  be  the 
very  man  to  study  it  most  closeh'.  You  must  know  your 
servant  even  more  than  you  need  to  know  j^our  master. 
One  of  the  most  subtle  and  interesting  of  all  studies  in 
literature  is  to  see  the  delicacy  and  vigor  of  the  relation- 
ship that  exists  between  every  really  great  writer  and 
the  age  he  lives  in.  Shakespeare,  Milton,  Drydeu,  Words- 
worth, Tennyson,  they  are  all  specimens  of  this,  of  the 
way  in  which  a  reaUy  gi*eat  man  gets  from  his  time  its 
influence,  assumes  its  character,  writes  iu  it  as  he  never 
could  ha^'e  ^\Titten  in  any  other  time  than  that,  and  yet  is 
never  overcome  by  its  timidities.  This  is  the  difference 
of  the  great  and  little  writers  of  any  age,  just  as  it  is  the 
difference  between  the  large  and  little  lives  iu  any  society. 


332  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

A  large  man  lives  in  a  social  system  and  is  helped  by  all 
its  spirit.  A  little  man  lives  in  the  same  system  and  is 
always  afraid  of  violating  its  letter.  So  a  brave  author 
moves  with  his  time  and  is  inspired  by  it,  while  a  timid 
author  lies  under  his  time  and  is  crushed  by  it. 

I  am  sm-e  that  the  habit  of  review-reading  is  hostile 
to  literary  courage.  To  read  what  some  man,  a  critic  by 
profession,  has  said  about  a  great  live  book,  this,  wliich  is 
so  often  recommended  to  our  young  people,  and  which  we 
are  all  so  jubilant  over  as  a  splendid  way  of  saving  labor, 
is  probably  as  unstimiLlating  and  unfertilizing  a  process 
as  the  human  mind  can  submit  to.  It  makes  the  judg- 
ments technical  and  formal.  It  sets  us  all  to  writing 
books  or  judging  of  them  with  reference  to  other  books 
that  have  been  already  written  and  judged,  not  with  im- 
mediate reference  to  truths  and  thoughts.  To  the  passion 
for  review- writing  and  review-reading  which  has  possessed 
our  time,  belongs,  partty  as  cause,  but  more  largely  as 
effect,  the  critical  and  captious  temper  which  is  all  around 
us,  and  of  which  many  of  us  are  so  wonderfully  proud. 
No;  read  books  themselves,  and  not  men's  talk  about 
them.  To  read  a  book  is  to  make  a  friend.  To  read  a 
review  is  to  be  introduced  to  a  passing  stranger.  Better 
one  good  book  read  in  a  year  than  all  the  torrent  of  re- 
views that  roll  on  endlessl}^  from  month  to  month.  In 
the  book,  if  it  is  worth  your  reading,  you  meet  a  man — 
you  go  away  full  of  his  spirit — if  there  is  anything  in  you 
he  wiU  quicken  it.  In  the  review  you  meet  a  system. 
The  book  makes  you  brave  and  full  of  courageous  and 
ambitious  independence.  The  review  makes  you  timid 
and  afraid  of  blunders.  To  make  a  cordial  sympathy 
between  their  scholars  and  good  books,  to  make  young 
people  know  the  souls  of  books  and  find  their  own  souls 
in  knowing  them,  that  is  the  only  way  to  cultivate  their 
Uterary  courage,  and  that  it  is  the  joy  of  every  teacher 


COURAGE.  333 

who  has  flesh,  "blood,  and  a  soul  to  do.  0  teachers,  find 
this  courage  for  yourselves,  that  youi*  scholars  may  not 
he  cowards  where  it  is  most  of  all  needful  for  students  to 
he  hrave. 

I  have  spoken  to  you,  then,  of  courage.  It  is  one  and 
the  same  thing  everywhere.  The  fii-mness  with  which 
one  stands  upon  the  hopeless  deck  before  the  doomed  shij) 
goes  down,  the  persistenc}^  with  which  a  man  claims  that 
the  right  is  best  whatever  voices  clamor  for  the  wrong, 
the  intelligence  with  which  you  think  your  own  thought 
straight  through  the  confusion  of  other  thinking  men,  the 
independence  of  the  conscientious  politician,  the  delight 
of  the  writer  in  doing  his  own  work,  of  the  reader  in  form- 
ing his  own  judgments,  they  are  all  at  theu*  root  one  and 
the  same  thing.  One  gracious  and  another  stern,  they  are 
all  made  up,  hke  the  black  coal  and  the  sparkling  dia- 
mond, of  the  same  constituents.  Let  me  recount  in  brief 
what  those  constituents  are. 

Fii'st  of  all,  there  is  the  power  of  being  mastered  by  and 
possessed  -odth  an  idea.  How  rare  it  is  !  I  do  not  say  how 
few  men  are  so  mastered  and  possessed :  I  say  how  few  men 
have  the  power  so  to  be.  The  flue  and  simple  capacity  for 
it  which  belongs  to  youth  being  once  lost,  how  few  men  ever 
attain  the  culture  by  which  it  is  renewed.  But  witliout  it 
there  can  be  no  courage.  Without  some  end  set  clear  before 
you,  what  chance  is  there  that  you  can  shoot  your  arrow 
strong  and  straight  ?  It  does  not  need  that  you  should  be 
blind  to  all  the  difficulties  that  lie  between.  Recklessness  is 
no  part  of  coui'age.  When  CromweU  and  his  men  gave  the 
sublime  picture  of  heroic  courage  wliich  illuminates  Eng- 
lish history,  it  was  not  that  they  undervalued  the  enor- 
mous strength  of  what  thej'  fought  against ;  it  was  that 
they  saw  righteousness  and  freedom  shining  out  beyond, 
and  moved  toward  their  fascinating  presence  irresistibly. 
Courage,  like  every  other  good  thing,  must  be  positive, 


334  ESSAYS  AND  ADDBESSES. 

not  negative.  If  tlie  college  president  courageously  makes 
his  college  fresh  and  strong,  it  is  not  that  he  does  not  see 
the  strength  of  old  inertia,  hut  he  sees  the  ideal  and  the 
possil^ility  of  the  true  college  blazing  beyond  it  all.  So 
train  your  children  to  be  capable  of  the  dominion  of  ideas. 
As  you  build  a  house  for  its  inmate,  so  build  their  minds 
for  principles.  Even  before  the  idea  comes,  teach  them 
that  it  is  coming,  and  so  make  them  expect  their  true 
master. 

And  to  do  this  there  must  be,  in  the  second  place,  a 
freedom  from  self-cousciousness.  Self -consciousness  is 
at  the  root  of  every  cowardice.  To  think  about  one's 
self  is  death  to  real  thought  about  any  noble  thing.  Let 
me  cpiote  you  a  famous  old  story  which  seems  a  parable : 
"  The  beautiful  Lady  Diana  Rich,  daughter  of  the  Earl  of 
Holland,  as  she  was  Avalking  in  the  garden  at  Kensington 
before  dinner,  met  with  her  own  apparition,  habit  and 
everj^hing,  as  in  a  looking-glass.  About  a  month  after, 
she  died  of  the  smallpox.  And  'tis  said  that  her  sister, 
the  Lady  Isabella,  saAv  the  like  of  herself  also  before  she 
died.  A  third  sister,  Mary,  was  married  to  the  first  Earl 
of  Breadalluine,  and  it  is  recorded  that  she  also,  not  long 
after  her  marriage,  had  some  such  warning  of  her  ap- 
proaching dissolution."  Such  is  the  old  tradition  of  the 
house  of  Holland.  Is  it  not  a  parable  ?  Does  not  he  who 
sees  himself  die?  Does  not  the  mind  that  dwells  upon 
itself  lose  just  that  fine  and  lofty  power  of  being  mastered 
by  a  principle  ?  The  most  courageous  men  I  ever  knew, 
if  they  were  marked  by  any  one  thing  were  marked  by 
this,  that  they  forgot  themselves,  that  they  were  free  from 
self-consciousness.  So  no  clinging  garments  of  their  self- 
hood hindered  them  in  running  to  the  goal. 

And  there  is  one  thing  more,  which  is  simpHcity.  The 
elaborateness  of  life  makes  cowards  of  us.  It  is  not  the 
bigness  of  the  sea,  but  the  many  mouths  with  which  it 


COURAGE.  335 

mocks  his  feebleness,  that  makes  the  strong  swimmer 
grow  afraid  and  sink.  We  want  to  find  some  one  thing 
whicli  we  are  snre  of,  and  tie  oiir  Hves  to  tliat,  stand 
strong  on  it  to  bnffet  off  onr  fears.  When  Hannibal  Avas 
besieging  Rome,  some  man  in  the  besieged  city  gave  cour- 
age to  the  rest  by  purchasing  for  a  large  sum  the  plot  of 
ground  outside  tlie  walls  on  which  the  tent  of  the  invad- 
ing general  was  pitched.  It  was  a  brave  deed.  He  be- 
lieved in  Rome.  That  one  thing  he  was  sure  of.  With 
dogged  obstinacy  he  believed  that  Rome  would  conquer. 
Some  one  sure  thing,  made  sure  of  early  in  our  life,  kept 
clear  through  all  obscurit}' — that  is  what  keeps  life  sim- 
ple, that  is  what  keeps  it  fresh  and  never  lets  its  bravery 
go  out. 

To  be  able  to  obey  ideas,  to  be  free  from  self-conscious- 
ness, to  be  simple — these  ai-e  the  secrets  of  courage. 

Teachers,  it  is  your  privilege  to  live  a  life  where  all 
these  elements  of  courage  may  be  most  richly  cultivated. 
It  is  oui"  lot,  O  fellow-teachers,  to  live  a  life  where  all  these 
elements  of  courage  are  most  in  danger.  Danger  and 
chance  together  make  the  richest  life.  The  highest  moun- 
tain-top is  that  Avhich  wears  as  a  coronet  the  ch)uds  through 
which  it  has  to  pierce.  Quern  nuhila  vida  coronat.  I  re- 
joice mth  you  upon  what  you  know  better  than  I  do,  the 
need  and  the  culture  of  courage  in  the  teacher's  hard  and 
useful  life. 


ADDRESS    AT    THE    DEDICATION    OF    PUBLIC 

LATIN  AND  ENGLISH  HIGH  SCHOOL-HOUSE, 

BOSTON,  MASS.,  FEBRUARY   22,  1881. 

I  SHOULD  be  very  sorry,  sir,  at  tliis  late  liour,  to  under- 
take to  treat  of  the  relations  of  religion  to  science.  I 
heard,  several  hours  ago  in  this  meeting,  some  excelleut 
remarks  that  were  made  upon  that  subject,  and  I  think  I 
must  leave  to  the  thoughtf  ulness  of  this  great  assembly 
the  garnering  up  of  the  noble  and  wise  things  that  were 
said  to  us  by  the  principal  of  the  Latin  School. 

I  Avant  to  speak  only  a  few  moments,  if  I  can  restrain 
myself  so.  It  is  all  very  well  to  talk  about  the  magnifi- 
cence of  this  new  building.  It  is  magnificent — and  we 
are  thankful  for  it ;  but  to  me  there  is  something  infinitely 
sad  and  pathetic  this  morning  in  thinking  of  oiu*  old  Latin 
and  English  High  School-house  standing  empty  and  deso- 
late down  in  Bedford  Sti-eet.  I  cannot  get  it  out  of  my 
mind.  I  cannot,  as  I  look  around  upon  the  brilliancy  of 
this  new  building,  forget  what  that  old  building  has  done. 
I  cannot  help  thinking  of  it  almost  as  a  person,  and  won- 
dering if  it  hears  what  we  are  saying  here.  I  cannot  help 
tliinking  that  from  the  top  of  the  old  brown  cupola  it 
looks  across  the  length  of  the  city  and  sees  the  pinnacles 
of  this  new  temple  which  is  to  take  its  place.  I  cannot 
help  thinking  that,  even  through  its  closed  and  dusty 
windows,  it  is  hearing  something  of  the  triumphant  shouts 
with  which  its  successor's  walls  are  riuging.  I  canjiot 
help  wondering  what  it  thinks  about  it  all. 

336 


BOSTON  LATIN  AND  ENGLISH  HIGH  SCHOOL.     .)o/ 

But  wlien  I  know,  letting  tliat  old  scliool-lionse  stand 
before  me  for  a  moment  in  personal  shape — when  I  kuoAV 
what  a  dear  and  earnest  old  creature  it  was,  when  I- know 
how  carefully  it  looked  after  those  who  came  into  its  cul- 
ture and  embrace,  when  I  know  how  many  of  us  will 
always  look  back  to  it,  through  the  whole  course  of  our 
lives,  as  the  place  where  were  gathered  some  of  the  deep- 
est inspirations  that  ever  came  to  us,  I  cannot  but  think 
that  the  old  school  is  noble  enough  aud  generous  enough 
to  look  with  joy  aud  satisfaction  upon  this  new  build- 
ing tliat  has  risen  to  take  its  place.  And  as  the  old  year 
kindly  and  ungrudgingly  sinks  back  into  the  generations 
of  the  i)ast,  and  allows  the  new  year  to  come  in  with  its 
new  activities,  and  as  the  father  steps  aside  and  sees  the 
son  who  bears  his  nature,  and  whom  he  has  taught  the 
best  he  knows,  come  forth  into  life  and  fill  his  place,  so  I 
am  wilhng  to  believe  that  the  old  school  rejoices  in  this,  its 
great  siiccessor,  and  that  it  is  thinking  (if  it  has  thoughts) 
of  its  own  useful  career,  and  congratulating  itself  upon 
the  earnest  and  faithful  way  in  which  it  has  pursued,  not 
only  the  special  iiietJiods  of  knowledge  which  have  belonged 
to  its  time,  but  the  lyurposes  of  knowledge,  which  belong 
to  all  time,  and  must  pass  from  school-house  to  school- 
house,  and  from  age  to  age,  unchanged. 

The  perpetuity  of  knowledge  is  in  the  perpetuity  of  the 
purposes  of  knowledge.  The  thing  which  links  this  school- 
house  with  all  the  school-houses  of  the  generations  of  the 
past — the  thing  that  links  together  the  great  schools  of 
the  middle  ages,  and  the  schools  of  old  Greece,  and  the 
schools  of  the  Hebrews,  where  the  youth  of  that  time  were 
found  sitting  at  the  feet  of  their  "w-ise  rabbis — is  the  per- 
petual identity  of  the  moral  purposes  of  knowledge.  The 
methods  of  knowledge  are  constantly  changing.  The 
school-books  that  were  studied  ten,  twenty,  thirty  years 
ago  have  passed  out  of  date ;  the  scholars  of  to-day  do  not 


338  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

even  know  tlieir  names ;  but  the  purpose  for  which  onr 
school-books  are  studied,  tlie  things  we  are  trying  to  get 
out  of  them,  the  things  which,  if  they  are  properly  taught 
and  studied,  the  scholars  of  to-day  do  get  out  of  them, 
are  the  same ;  and  so  across  the  years  we  clasp  hands  with 
our  own  school-boy  days. 

And  there  is  to  be  the  perpetuity  of  knowledge  in  the 
future.  One  wonders,  as  he  looks  around,  this  new  school- 
house,  what  is  to  be  taught  here  in  the  3-ears  to  come.  He 
is  sure  that  the  books  will  change,  that  the  sciences  will 
change,  that  new  studies  will  be  developed,  that  new 
methods  of  interpretation  will  be  discovered,  that  new 
kingdoms  of  the  iuflnite  knowledge  are  to  be  opened  to 
the  discerning  eye  of  man,  in  the  years  that  are  to  come. 
He  knows  it  is  impossible  for  any  man  to  say  what  will 
be  taught  in  these  halls  a  hundred  3'ears  hence  ;  but  yet, 
with  that  unknown  development  lie  is  in  deep  sympathy, 
because  he  knows  that  the  boys  of  a  hundred  years  hence, 
like  the  bovs  of  to-day,  will  be  taught  here  to  be  faith- 
ful to  the  deep  purposes  of  knowledge,  will  be  trained  to 
conscientious  study,  to  the  love  of  knowledge,  to  justice 
and  generosity,  to  respect  for  themselves,  and  obedience 
to  authority,  and  honor  for  man,  and  reverence  for  God. 
That  is  the  link  between  the  school-house  that  stood  be- 
hind the  King's  Chapel  and  this ;  and  that  is  the  only 
thing  that  in  the  j'ears  to  come  will  make  these  schools 
truly  the  same  schools  that  they  are  to-day. 

When  the  Duke  of  Wellington  came  back  to  Eton  after 
his  glorious  career,  as  he  was  walking  through  the  old 
quadi'angle  he  looked  around  and  said,  "  Here  is  where  I 
learned  the  lessons  that  made  it  possible  for  me  to  con- 
quer at  Waterloo."  It  was  not  what  he  had  read  there  in 
books,  not  what  he  had  learned  there  by  writing  Greek 
verses,  or  by  scanning  the  lines  of  Virgil  or  Horace,  that 
helped  him  win  his  great  battle ;  but  there  he  had  learned 


BOSTON  LATIN  AND  ENGLISH  HIGH  SCHOOL.     339 

to  be  faithful  to  present  duty,  to  be  strong,  to  be  diligent, 
to  be  patient,  and  that  was  why  he  w^as  al)le  to  say  that  it 
was  what  he  had  learned  at  Eton  that  had  made  it  possible 
for  him  to  conquer  at  Waterloo. 

And  the  same  thing  made  it  possible  for  the  Latin  and 
High  School  boys  to  help  win  the  victory  which  came  at 
Gettysbuj'g,  and  under  the  very  walls  of  Richmond.  It 
was  the  lessons  which  they  had  learned  here.  It  Avas  not 
simply  the  lessons  which  the}'  had  learned  out  of  books ;  it 
was  the  grand  imprint  of  character  that  had  been  given 
to  them  here.  The  Mohammedan  says,  "  The  ink  of  the 
learned  is  as  precious  as  the  blood  of  the  martyrs."  Our 
English  High  School  and  our  Latin  School  have  had  "  the 
ink  of  the  learned"  and  "the  blood  of  the  martyrs"  too. 
They  have  sent  forth  young  men  who  have  added  to  the 
world's  wisdom  and  to  its  vast  dissemination ;  they  have 
sent  forth  young  men  who  have  laid  down  their  lives  that 
the  country  might  be  perpetual,  and  that  slavery  might 
die. 

I  have  always  remembered — it  seemed  but  a  passing 
impression  at  the  moment,  but  it  has  never  left  me — how 
one  day,  when  I  was  going  home  from  the  old  Adams 
School  in  Mason  Street,  I  saw  a  little  group  of  people 
gathered  down  in  Bedford  Street ;  and,  with  a  boy's  curi- 
osity, I  went  into  the  crowd,  and  peeped  around  among 
the  big  men  who  were  in  my  way  to  see  what  they  were 
doing.  I  found  that  they  were  laying  the  corner-stone  of 
a  new  school-house.  I  always  felt,  after  that,  when  I  was 
a  scholar  and  a  teacher  there,  and  ever  since,  that  I  had  a 
little  more  right  in  that  school-house  because  I  had  hap- 
pened, by  that  accident  of  passing  home  that  way  that  day 
from  school,  to  see  its  corner-stone  laid.  I  wish  that  eveiy 
boy  in  the  Latin  School  and  High  School,  and  every  boy 
in  Boston  who  is  old  enough  to  be  here,  who  is  ever  going 
to  be  in  these  schools,  could  be  here  to-day.     I  hope  they 


340  ESSAYS  AND   ADDIl ESSES. 

will  hear,  in  some  way  or  other,  through  the  echoes  that 
will  reach  them  from  this  audience,  with  what  solemn  and 
devout  feeling  we  have  here  consecrated  this  building  to 
the  purposes  which  the  old  building  so  nobly  served,  and 
in  the  serving  of  which  it  became  so  dear  to  us  all :  to  the 
preservation  of  sound  learning,  the  cultivation  of  manly 
character,  and  the  faithful  service  of  the  dear  country,  in 
whatever  untold  exigencies  there  may  be  in  the  years  to 
come,  in  which  she  will  demand  the  service  of  her  sons. 


DEAN  STANLEY. 

{Atlantic  Montlihj,  October,  1881.) 

When  Dean  Stanley,  on  the  18th  of  Jnh^,  was  drawing 
near  his  death,  he  asked  that  his  brother-in-hiw  and  hfe- 
long  friend,  Dr.  Vanghan,  might  preach  his  funeral  sermon 
in  Westminster  Abbe}^,  "  because,"  said  he,  "  he  has  known 
]ne  longest."  He  chose  the  friend  who  had  known  him 
all  his  life  to  speak  of  him.  There  was  nothing  in  all 
that  life  which  he  would  have  concealed ;  and  he  knew 
that  it  was  only  as  that  life  was  treated  as  a  whole,  and 
its  continual  characteristics  siu'veyed  in  their  develop- 
ment from  boyhood  to  the  matiu'e  age  in  which  he  then 
lay  djdng,  that  he  could  be  fitly  understood. 

This,  which  is  true  of  all  men,  was  specially  true  of 
Dean  Stanley.  When  he  came  to  America,  in  1878,  he 
was  wholly  taken  by  surprise  by  the  welcome  with  which 
he  was  received.  His  friends  themselves  were  unprepared 
for  any  such  enthusiastic  interest  in  one  who  was  known 
only  as  a  writer  of  books  and  as  an  ecclesiastic  of  a  for- 
eign establishment.  Men  and  women  of  all  classes  seemed 
to  greet  him  as  if  he  were  their  friend.  It  must  have  meant 
that  in  his  books  there  was  that  power,  which  not  many 
books  possess,  of  making  those  who  read  them  know  their 
author  as  a  man — of  making  his  personal  life  and  charac- 
ter real  and  vivid  to  them.  Therefore,  they  thronged  the 
churches  where  he  preached,  and  even  the  streets  in  which 
he  walked,  not  merely  to  hear  his  words,  but  to  see  him. 

And  there  can  be  no  doubt  as  to  what  was  the  personal 

Ml 


342  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

impression  which  men  had  of  him.  Ten  years  ago  a  wise 
writer  in  the  Contemporanj  Rei'ietv  said,  "  If  we  were  to 
attempt  a  description  of  Dean  Stanley's  characteristics, 
we  shonld  name  first  and  chief  of  all  his  intense  love  for 
the  light."  That  word  describes  the  passion  of  his  life. 
The  insatiable  cnriosity,  the  eagerness  to  acquire  and  to 
impart  intelligent  conceptions,  accompanied  by  an  abso- 
lute moral  clearness,  a  wonderful  singie-mindedness,  and 
a  sympathy  and  fairness  which  never  failed — these,  which 
are  the  elements  in  which  light  lives  and  grows,  were 
what  we  all  delighted  to  discover  in  him  while  he  lived, 
and  what  we  delight  to  remember  now  that  he  is  gone. 
His  living  and  learning  and  working  was  like  the  shining 
of  a  star.  "  It  is  no  task  for  stars  to  shine,"  and  so  with 
him  all  that  he  did  seemed  easy,  as  if  it  were  but  the 
natural  and  spontaneous  utterance  of  what  he  was,  the 
effortless  radiance  of  a  nature  which  was  made  to  gather 
and  to  utter  light.  Intelligence  shone  in  the  refined  alert- 
ness of  his  face — which,  by  the  wa}',  has  never  found  sucli 
good  representation  as  in  some  of  the  photographs  that 
were  taken  in  America.  His  style  had  a  crystal  clearness, 
which  showed  his  thought  distincth'.  His  very  walk  was 
quick  and  eager,  as  if  he  must  find  what  he  sought.  It  is 
no  wonder  that  many  men  have  instantly  applied  to  him 
Matthew  Arnold's  famons  phrase,  "  sweetness  and  light." 
And  the  Spectator  could  use  of  him  an  expression  which 
would  be  ridiculous  if  it  were  used  of  almost  any  other 
public  man,  and  declare  that  his  death  "  leaves  the  public 
Avith  a  sense  of  having  lost  something  rare  and  sweet." 

In  due  time  there  must  come  a  Life  of  Stanley  which, 
if  it  he  worthily  written,  will  be  one  of  the  richest  records 
of  the  best  life  of  our  century,  and  one  of  the  most  attrac- 
tive pictures  of  a  human  life  in  any  time.  His  large  asso- 
ciations and  continual  activity  aiul  ceaseless  correspon- 
dence must  have  left  most  precious  materials  for  such  a 


DEAN  STANLEY.  343 

book.  If  there  were  ouly  another  Stanley  left  to  write  it ! 
Let  us  here  recall  its  simplest  outline.  He  was  born,  as 
he  used  to  love  to  recall,  in  1815,  the  year  of  Waterloo, 
and  received  his  name  of  Arthur  from  the  great  duke  of 
whose  renown  all  England  then  was  full.  His  father  was 
the  brave  and  clear-sighted  Bishop  of  Norwich,  who  stood 
with  Whately  in  the  House  of  Lords  when  one  of  the  first 
petitions  was  presented  on  the  subject  of  subscription, 
who  was  the  friend  of  Arnold  and  asked  him  to  preach  his 
consecration  sermon,  and  whose  life  his  son  has  written 
with  a  son's  affection  and  the  admiration  of  a  kindred 
soul.  To  his  mother  Arthur  Stanley  dedicated  his  "Jewish 
Church,"  in  recollection  of  "  her  firm  faith,  calm  wisdom, 
and  tender  sympathy " ;  and  of  her,  too,  he  has  written 
delightfully  in  the  same  volume  that  portraj^s  his  father's 
life.  When  he  was  fourteen  years  old,  in  1829,  he  went 
to  Rugby,  and  was  one  of  the  first  pupils  of  his  father's 
friend.  His  ''  Life  of  Dr.  Arnold,"  which  is  pei-haps  the 
best  biography  of  our  time,  is  the  truest  record  of  what 
Rugby  was  to  him.  There  is  one  passage  in  it  which,  as 
we  read  it,  still  lets  us  see  the  boy  sitting  beneath  that 
pulpit  in  the  Rugby  chapel,  with  his  eyes  fixed  upon  the 
teacher,  and  gathering  into  his  open  heart  ''an  image  of 
high  principle  and  feeling,"  which  found  in  him  a  true 
mirror  and  was  never  blotted  out.  In  1834,  when  he  was 
nineteen  years  old,  Stanley  went  to  Oxford,  and  there 
spent  four  years  in  the  midst  of  the  intense  religious 
excitement  of  those  days.  He  went  forth  from  his  student 
life  laden  with  the  honors  and  prizes  of  the  university. 
Then  he  became  a  fellow  and  tutor.  Later  he  was  made 
the  secretary  of  the  Oxford  University  Commission.  In 
1845  he  was  chosen  to  be  select  preacher  to  the  university. 
Five  years  later  he  became  a  canon  of  Canterbury  Cathe- 
dral, and  in  1852  he  made  the  journey  to  the  East,  the 
record  of  which  is  in  the  glowing  pages  of  his  "  Sinai  and 


344  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Palestine."  In  1853  he  was  appointed  Regius  professor 
of  ecclesiastical  history  at  Oxford,  and  to  his  labors  in 
that  chair  we  owe  the  "  Lectures  on  the  Jewish  Church  " 
and  the  "  Lectures  on  the  Eastern  Church,"  which  have 
opened  the  doors  of  the  Old  Testament  and  of  the  early 
Church  to  hosts  of  readers.  In  1862  he  went  to  Palestine 
again  with  the  Prince  of  Wales,  and  the  "  Sermons  in  the 
East"  recount  the  lessons  of  that  journe}-.  In  18G3  he 
was  made  Dean  of  Westminster,  and  began  to  wear  that 
title  by  which  he  will  always  be  best  known- — the  title 
which  he  loved  above  all  others. 

It  was  a  bright  and  happy  life.  And  it  was  constantly 
productive.  Besides  the  books  already  named,  there  were 
published  in  1847  the  "■  Sermons  and  Essays  on  the  Apos- 
tolic Age  " ;  in  1855,  the  "  Commentary  on  the  Epistles  to 
the  Corinthians " ;  in  the  same  year,  the  "  Historical 
Memorials  of  Canterbury  " ;  in  1867,  the  "  Historical  Me- 
morials of  Westminster  Abbey  " ;  in  1870,  the  "  Essays  on 
Church  and  State,"  which  has  been  well  described  as  "the 
epic  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War  in  the  Church  of  England  "  ; 
and  in  1877  "  Lectures  on  the  Church  of  Scotland,"  which, 
as  Bisho})  Ewing  wrote,  "  show  a  marvelous  acquaintance 
with  Scotch  facts  and  their  bearings."  And  last  of  all 
there  was  his  most  interesting  volume  on  "  Christian  In- 
stitutions," which  was  hardly  issued  when  he  died.  These 
marked  the  great  current  of  his  life  and  study.  And 
around  them,  no  less  characteristic  and  full  of  his  char- 
acter and  spirit,  like  si)ray  flung  up  by  the  impetuous  and 
eager  stream,  there  gathered  a  cloud  of  lectures,  sermons, 
reviews,  and  articles  of  every  kind,  bearing  perpetual  wit- 
ness to  the  activity  of  his  mind,  the  wide  range  of  his 
learning,  and  the  quickness  of  his  sympathy  with  life. 

And  now,  what  were  his  characteristics  as  they  were 
indicated  in  this  life  and  work  ?  First  of  aU,  as  we  have 
said,  there  was  the  love  of  light.     No  man  ever  loved 


DEAN  STANLEY.  345 

more  to  look  facts  in  the  face,  and  to  know  the  exact  and 
certain  truth.  "  Let  us  be  firmly  persuaded,"  he  wrote, 
"  that  error  is  most  easily  eradicated  bj^  estaljlishing  truth, 
and  darkness  most  permanently  displaced  by  diffusing 
lig'ht."  There  is  no  clearer  illustration  of  this  love  of 
light  than  in  his  eager  and  impassioned  insistence  that 
the  revision  of  the  translation  of  the  Bible  should  have 
the  help  of  all  the  best  scholarship  of  England,  in  what- 
ever creed  or  church  it  might  be  found.  His  speech  in 
Convocation,  when  it  was  proposed  to  reject  the  help  of  a 
Unitarian  which  had  already  been  iindted,  is  a  fine  utter- 
ance at  once  of  intelligent  judgment  and  of  chivalrous 
courtesy  and  justice.  And  it  is  interesting  to  see  always 
who  are  the  men  whom  he  loves  most,  the  men  of  whom 
he  speaks  with  the  most  spontaneous  affection.  Always 
they  are  the  men  of  light.  It  is  "the  clear-headed  and 
intrepid  Zwingle,"  who,  he  says,  "  anticipated  the  neces- 
sary conclusion  of  the  whole  matter"  of  the  efficacy  of 
the  eucharistic  rite.  It  is  the  liberal  theologians  of  the 
seventeenth  centiuy  to  whom  he  always  turns  back  for 
the  best  patterns  of  religious  thought  in  England.  We 
of  America  may  well  love  to  remember  how  he  treasured 
the  friendship  of  one  of  our  own  men  of  light,  whose  loss 
we  are  still  freshly  mourning.  "  Dear  Dr.  Washburn  !  " 
he  wrote  this  spring,  "how  well  I  remember  preaching 
in  that  great  Calvary,  and  my  visit  to  him  in  the  latter 
da\'s  of  my  stay  in  New  York.  He  was  of  ^  that  small 
transfigured  baild  whom  the  world  cannot  tame' — the 
band  of  Falkland,  Leighton,  Whichcote,  Arnold,  Maurice, 
Peace  be  with  him  !  " 

Again,  there  is  the  specialness  of  the  method  of  all  Dean 
Stanley's  work,  the  way  in  which  he  approached  all  truth 
through,  history.  It  has  often  been  said  of  him  that  lie 
was  no  metaphysician,  and  that  he  had  no  turn  for  ab- 
stract thought.     Nobody  saw  this,  and  nobody  has  said  it, 


346  ESSAYS  AXD  ADBIlESSIiS. 

more  clearly  tlian  himself.  When  he  was  asked  to  write 
an  introdnction  to  Bunsen's  "  God  in  History,"  he  replied : 
*'I  hesitated,  among  other  reasons,  because  it  relates  so 
largel}^  to  philosophical  and  abstract  questions,  on  which  I 
do  not  feel  myself  competent  to  enter.''  Truth  has  manj^ 
doors,  and  he  would  enter  it  tlu'ough  that  to  which  his 
feet  most  naturally  turned.  This  recognition  of  the  spe- 
cialness,  or,  if  we  please,  the  limitation,  of  his  power  had 
much  to  do  with  the  effectiveness,  and  also  with  the  peren- 
nial freshness,  of  his  life.  On  the  steamer  at  New  York, 
when  he  was  leaving  iVjnerica,  he  was  asked  whether  he 
was  not  weary  with  his  most  laborious  journey.  But  he 
answered,  "  No ;  I  have  declined  to  see  anything  in  which 
I  was  not  interested.  Kind  friends  have  asked  me  to  go 
to  see  factories,  and  many  other  interesting  things  for 
which  I  did  not  care  ;  but  I  have  confined  myself  to  things 
which  I  did  care  for,  and  so  I  am  not  tired."  So  it  was 
all  his  life.  He  worked  as  he  was  made  to  work  and  as 
he  loved  to  work,  and  so  the  last  page  that  he  "vvi'ote  was 
as  fresh  and  unwearied  as  the  first.  He  is  everywhere 
and  always  the  historian.  If  he  wants  to  define  a  doc- 
trine, he  traces  its  history.  If  he  makes  a  i)age  glow  like 
a  picture  with  some  description  of  natural  scenery,  it  is 
always  as  the  theater  of  lunnau  action,  or  as  a  metaphor 
of  human  life,  that  he  describes  it.  Of  pure  love  for  na- 
ture for  its  own  sake  he  shows  but  little.  lu  his  volume 
of  "Addresses  iu  America"  there  are  three  beautiful  pic- 
tures from  nature,  but  it  is  noticeable  that  in  each  case 
the  pictm-e  is  drawn  with  reference  to  hunum  life.  He 
described  Niagara ;  but  it  was  because  he  saw  in  its  mist 
and  majesty  an  image  of  the  future  of  American  destiny. 
He  told  of  a  maple  and  an  oak  which  he  saw  growing 
together  from  the  same  stem  on  the  beautiful  shores  of 
Lake  George  ;  but  it  was  because  there  seemed  to  him  to 
be  in  them  a  likeness  of  the  unbroken  union  of  the  bril- 


DEAN  STANLEY.  347 

liant,  fiery  maple  of  America  and  the  gnarled  and  twisted 
oak  of  England.  He  pictured  tlie  effects  of  sunrise  on 
the  Alps ;  but  it  was  the  rise  of  true  and  rational  religion 
among  men  that  he  wanted  his  hearers  to  see  in  Ms  ma- 
jestic words.  Everywhere  his  eye  is  upon  man.  He  is 
always  the  historian,  because  in  the  simplest  and  most 
literal  sense  he  is  ahvays  the  jjhilanthropist,  tlie  lover  of 
man. 

And  it  is  not  only  men,  but  man,  tliat  he  loves ;  nay,  it 
is  mainly  man.  He  loves  men  for  the  sake  of  man,  for 
their  contribution  to  and  their  share  in  humanity.  There- 
fore it  was  that  he  could  care  most  earnestly  for  men  in 
whose  special  arts  and  occupations  he  personally  had  no 
share  or  interest.  To  him  the}^  were  all  pai-t  of  the  great 
human  drama,  full  of  divine  meanings.  He  could  preach 
in  the  Abbey  of  the  greatness  of  a  great  naturalist,  although 
he  was  no  student  of  natural  science ;  or  of  a  great  musi- 
cian, though  he  had  no  taste  for  music ;  or  of  a  great  nov- 
elist, although  he  could  not  read  his  novels.  Sometimes 
his  eulogies  have  seemed  to  some  men  to  be  indiscrimi- 
nately lavished,  but  we  must  have  the  sight,  which  he 
never  lost,  of  the  endless  human  procession,  ever  moving 
on ;  each  faithful  liuman  being,  famous  or  insignificant, 
bearing  his  gift,  great  or  small,  intelligible  or  unintelligi- 
ble to  his  brethren,  yet  all  accepted  and  laid  up  in  the  vast 
temple  of  the  divine  purpose,  to  which  they  move,  in  which 
they  slowly  disappear.  We  must  have  this  sight  before 
we  can  understand  or  judge  his  judgments  of  his  feUow- 
men. 

One  rejoices  to  think  how  full  of  poetry  the  world  must 
have  been  to  him.  A  walk  in  London  or  Jerusalem  must 
have  been  crowded  with  memory,  and  fear,  and  hope,  and 
love.  The  unexjn-essed,  half -conscious  joy  of  life  to  one 
who  carries  such  a  mind  and  eye  must  be  something  of 
which  the  multitude  of  us  know  nothing. 


3-18  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

And  while  we  gi-aiit  its  specialness,  while  we  see  the 
need  of  other  methods  for  the  entire  mastery  of  truth,  let 
us  acknowledge  the  greatness  and  beauty  of  the  historic 
method,  of  which  Dean  Stanley  gave  such  a  noteworthy 
example.  In  the  turmoil  of  a  2)riori  reasoning,  in  the 
hurly-burly  of  men's  speculations  about  what  ought  to 
be,  let  us  welcome  the  enthusiastic  student  of  what  is  and 
of  what  has  been.  The  gospel  in  the  ages  must  always 
be  part  of  the  same  revelation  with  the  gospel  in  the  Bible 
and  the  gospel  in  the  heart.  "We  cannot  afford  to  lose  the 
softening  and  richening  of  opinions  by  the  historic  sense. 
The  ecclesiastical  historian  and  the  systematic  theologian 
must  go  hand  in  hand.  "  The  word  of  the  Lord  which  was 
given  in  the  Council  of  Nicasa,"  says  Athanasius,  ''  abideth 
forever,"  but  the  personal  History  of  the  Council,  which 
Dean  Stanley  has  so  wonderfully  told,  is  part  of  the  word 
of  God  which  comes  from  tliat  memorable  assemblage  to 
all  the  generations. 

The  catholicity  and  charity  for  which  Dean  Stanley's 
name  has  become  almost  a  synonym  is  wortliy  of  being 
carefully  studied,  in  order  that  its  full  greatness  may  be 
known.  Some  men's  toleration  of  those  who  differ  from 
them  is  mere  good-nature  and  indifference.  Other  men's 
toleration  is  the  mere  application  of  a  theory,  and  is  quite 
consistent  with  strong  personal  dislikes.  In  the  Dean  of 
Westminster  the  eatholicity  which  so  impressed  the  world 
and  drew  the  hearts  of  all  good  men  to  him  was  the  issue 
of  a  lofty  conception  of  the  Church  of  Christ,  combined 
with  that  instinctive  love  for  man  of  which  we  have  been 
speaking ;  and  heart  and  mind  were  perfectly  united  in  it. 
Therefore  the  public  and  the  private  life  were  in  com- 
pletest  harmony.  It  is  well  known  with  what  a  generous 
hospitalit}^  the  doors  of  the  deanery  stood  wide  open. 
Older  men  tell  how,  in  older  days,  tlie  Stanley  rooms  at 
Oxford  were  eagerly  thronged  with  all  who  had  any  desire 


DEAX  STANLEY.  349 

to  seek  the  light  which  filled  them ;  but  what  we  know 
best,  and  what  will  always  be  remembered  by  multitudes 
as  tlie}^  pass  in  sight  of  the  little  dark  door,  hidden  away 
where  yet  so  many  pilgrims  found  it,  under  the  cloister 
arch  as  you  pass  through  to  the  Jerusalem  Chamber,  is 
the  open  welcome  which  at  the  deanery  in  Stanley's  time 
was  always  waiting  for  whoever  brought  anything  of  love 
for  truth  or  interest  in  noble  things. 

"I  love  all  who  love  truth,  if  poor  or  rich, 
In  what  they  have  won  of  truth  possessively  ! " 

That  was  the  spirit  of  the  place,  and  evidently  before 
such  a  spirit  no  enmity  could  stand.  Dean  Stanley  was  a 
strange  instance  of  a  man  who  was  dreaded  and  disliked 
in  hundreds  of  rectories  and  homes  in  England  for  the 
ideas  which  he  held,  or  was  supposed  to  hold,  but  who 
had  not  a  personal  enemy  in  all  the  world.  When  he  was 
made  Dean  of  Westminster,  Christopher  Wordsworth,  who 
was  one  of  the  canons  of  the  Abbey,  publicly  protested 
against  the  appointment.  When  he  died,  the  same  Chiis- 
topher  Wordsworth,  now  Bishop  of  Lincoln,  bating  noth- 
ing of  his  disapproval  of  the  Dean's  opinions,  bore  most 
affectionate  testimony  in  Convocation  to  the  richness  and 
nobleness  of  Stanley's  character. 

All  this  means  something.  It  means  that  Stanley  had 
the  power  of  going  himself,  and  of  compelling  the  men 
who  dealt  with  him  to  go,  down  to  those  deeper  regions 
of  life  and  thought  where  men  of  different  opinions  may 
find  themselves  in  a  true  sympathy.  Therefore  his  catho- 
licity was  real.  Men  did  not  meet  at  the  deanery  in  an 
armed  truce,  but  in  a  deeper  brotherhood.  When  Stanley 
Vent  and  lectured  to  the  Scotch  Presliyterians,  or  to  the 
American  Methodists  or  Baptists,  it  was  a  real  thing.  He 
carried  to  all  of  them  the  truth  on  which  their  truths 
rested.     He  taught  the  Scotch  out  of  Chalmers,  and  the 


350  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

Methodists  out  of  Wesley,  and  the  Congregationalists  out 
of  Dr.  Robinson.  "  As  certain  also  of  your  own  poets 
have  said,"  he  seemed  to  be  always  repeating,  as  if  in 
the  highest  and  truest  and  most  poetic  utterance  of  each 
man's  faith  he  rejoiced  to  find  the  essence  of  the  common 
faith  of  all.  In  one  of  the  last  articles  which  he  wrote 
there  is  an  estimate  of  Newman,  Pusey,  and  Keble  which, 
without  in  the  least  losing  the  clear  discrimination  of 
their  opinions,  is  wondei-fully  full  of  appreciative  honor 
for  the  men;  and  hardly  anj^  page  in  all  his  writings 
glows  with  more  generous  enthusiasm  than  that,  in  the 
same  article,  in  which  he  records  the  oj)i30sition  of  the 
Liberal  party  in  the  Churcli  of  England  against  the  at- 
tempt to  put  down  the  Tractarians  in  1844.  The  volume 
of  "Essays  on  Church  and  State"  is  a  book  which  every 
religious  student  ought  to  read,  for  it  contains  his  three- 
fold plea  for  liberty — liberty  for  the  Evangelical,  the 
Rationalist,  and  the  Ritualist ;  a  liberty  for  which  he 
pleads  in  the  name  of  that  large  conception  of  the  Church 
of  Christ  which  would  be  mangled  if  any  one  of  these 
representatives  of  the  three  great  perpetual  tyj)es  of  relig- 
ious life  were  persecuted  or  expelled. 

It  is  evident  that  a  catholicity  as  positive  as  this  could 
not  rest  in  mere  sentiment.  There  was  always  an  enthu- 
siastic chivalry  waiting,  sleeping  on  its  arms,  and  ready 
to  spring  up  at  the  slightest  cry  of  oppression  or  unfair- 
ness, and  utter  itself  in  word  and  deed.  How  we  shall 
miss  his  voice !  Whenever  meanness  or  bigotry  lifted 
its  head  we  knew  that  we  should  hear  from  Stanley.  When 
the  atmosphere  grew  heavy  we  looked  for  the  lightning 
of  his  speech.  In  1866  Convocation  undertook  to  de- 
nounce Bishop  Colenso  for  his  theological  writings,  and 
to  confirm  his  deposition.  As  one  reads  the  speech  of 
Stanley,  one  can  see  him  on  his  feet  in  the  midst  of  the 
bishop's  enemies.     The  small  figure,  great  with  iudigna- 


DEAN  STANLEY.  351 

tion,  seems  to  dilate  before  us.  He  takes  possession  of 
our  synipatliies,  as  liis  words  took  possession  then  of  the 
real  heart  of  England.  He  says  in  the  plainest  language 
how  absolutely  his  method  of  studying  the  Bible  differs 
from  Colenso's.  He  emphasizes  his  plea  by  a  disclaimer 
of  personal  association.  But  he  pleads  for  free  speech 
and  for  light.  "  The  Bishop  of  Natal  gives  us  more  than 
he  can  ever  take  from  us  by  the  testimony  which  is  thuf 
rendered  to  all  the  woi-ld  that  the  power  of  thought  and 
speech  is  still  left  to  us,  even  in  the  highest  ranks  of  our 
hierai'chy.  This  is  worth  a  hundred  mistakes  that  he  may 
liave  made  about  the  author  of  the  Pentateuch."  He  tells 
Convocation  that  among  living  prelates  and  clergymen  of 
the  Church  of  England  there  are  hundreds  and  thousands 
who  hold  the  same  principles  as  Bishop  Colenso,  "  against 
whom  you  have  not  proposed  and  dare  not  propose  to 
institute  proceedings."  Among  these  he  describes  himself. 
Then  he  cries  out,  ''At  least,  deal  out  the  same  measure 
to  me  that  you  deal  to  him  ;  at  least  judge  for  all  a  right- 
eous judgment.  Deal  out  tlie  same  measure  to  those  who 
are  well  befriended  and  who  are  present  as  to  those  who 
are  unbefriended  and  absent." 

It  would  be  hard  to  find  a  truer  chivalry  than  that.  It 
would  be  hard  to  say  what  nobler  use  could  possibly  be 
made  of  privilege  and  power  and  prosperity  than  thus  to 
hold  them  like  a  shield  over  the  oppressed  and  helpless. 
Something  of  the  same  chivalry  appears  in  his  contin- 
ual assertion  of  the  worth  of  goodness  outside  the  visible 
church  and  the  formal  associations  of  religion.  He,  liv- 
ing deep  in  those  associations,  and  loving  them  with  all 
his  heart,  is  watchful  and  jealous  lest  any  wrong  should 
be  done  to  that  larger  working  of  the  Spirit  of  God  which 
no  organization  can  express.  So  he  pleads  for  the  sacred- 
ness  of  secular  life.  So  he  even  becomes  the  champion  of 
a  depreciated  age  of  liistory,  and  in  the  article  which  I 


352  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

have  already  quoted  chivalrously  stands  up  for  the  despised 
and  dishonored  eighteenth  century. 

There  is  a  chivalry  in  prayer.  There  is  a  kind  of  prayer 
in  which  the  man  who  prays  seems  to  value  the  privilege 
of  his  spiritual  life  mostly  because  of  the  hope  which  it 
gives  him  for  the  darkest  and  most  hopeless  of  God's  chil- 
dren. Such  a  prayer  as  this  is  one  which  the  Dean  of 
Westminster  wrote  very  lately  for  one  of  the  days  of  the 
Church  year  for  which  the  Liturgy  provides  no  collect : 

"O  Eternal  Spirit,  through  whom  in  every  nation  he 
that  feareth  God  and  worketh  righteousness  is  accepted 
before  Him,  enlighten  our  hearts,  that  we  may  know  and 
]3erceive  in  all  nations  and  kindreds  of  people  whatsoever 
there  is  in  any  of  them  of  true  and  honest,  just  and  pure, 
lovely  and  of  good  report,  through  the  Word  which  light- 
eth  every  man,  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord." 

It  is  certain  that  the  religious  life  and  teaching-  of  Dean 
Stanley  have  given  immense  support  to  Christian  faith  in 
England.  In  Convocation,  just  after  he  died,  the  Arch- 
bishop of  Canterbury  spoke  of  him  thus :  "  There  are,  in 
a  great  community  like  ours,  a  vast  number  of  persons 
who  are  not  members  of  our  own  or  of  any  other  church, 
and  there  are  persons  whose  temptations  are  altogether 
in  the  direction  of  skepticism  ;  and  my  own  impression  is 
that  the  works  of  the  late  Dean  of  Westminster  have  con- 
firmed in  the  Christian  faith  a  vast  number  of  such  per- 
sons." That  is  a  noble  record  in  such  days  as  these.  To 
discriminate  the  essence  of  Christianity  from  its  accidents ; 
to  show  the  world  that  many  of  the  attacks  on  Christian 
faith  are  aimed  at  what  men  may  well  be  in  doubt  about, 
and  yet  be  Christians ;  to  lead  the  soul  behind  the  dis- 
putes whose  battle-ground  is  the  letter,  into  the  sanctuary 
of  the  Spirit;  to  bid  the  personal  loyalty  to  a  divine  Mas- 
ter stand  forth  from  the  tumult  of  doctrinal  discussion  as 
the  one  vital  power  of  the  Christian  life — this  is  a  work 


DEAN  STANLEY.  353 

for  the  defender  of  the  faith  which  is  full  of  inspiration, 
and  makes  multitudes  of  men  his  debtors.  Stanley's  last 
volume,  his  "  Christian  Institutions,"  does  this  with  won- 
derful clearness  and  power.  What  Christian  faith  and 
worship  really  are  stand  forth  in  that  book  in  most  calm 
and  majestic  simplicity.  As  we  read  it,  it"is  as  if  we  heard 
the  quiet  word  spoken  which  breaks  the  spell  of  ecclesias- 
ticism,  and  the  imprisoned  truth  or  principle  wakes  and 
stands  upon  its  feet  and  looks  us  in  the  eye.  The  flush 
of  life  comes  back  into  the  hard  face  of  dead  ceremonies, 
and  their  soul  reveals  itself.  Bubbles  of  venerable  super- 
stition seem  to  burst  before  our  eyes ;  and  we  feel  sure 
anew,  with  fresh  delight  and  hope,  that  not  fantastical 
complexity,  but  the  simijlicit}^  of  naturalness,  is  the  real 
temple  in  which  we  are  to  look  for  truth.  The  great  Chris- 
tian faith  of  the  future  wiU  honor  the  lifelong  teacher  of 
such  rational  Christianity  as  that  high  among  the  servants 
and  saviors  of  the  religion  of  Christ  in  England  in  these 
days  of  doubt,  high  among  the  faithful  souls  who,  in  the 
midst  of  perplexity  and  disbelief,  refused  to  despair  of  the 
Church  of  Christ. 

Nor  was  it  for  mere  concession  that  the  religion  of  the 
Dean  was  noteworthj^  His  whole  woi-k  was  constructive. 
He  was  the  most  conservative  of  radicals.  In  1863,  when 
he  bade  farewell  to  Oxford  that  he  might  go  to  Westmin- 
ster, these  were  his  last  words  to  the  young  men  of  the 
university :  ''Be  as  free,  be  as  liberal,  be  as  courageous, 
as  you  will,  but  be  religious,  hecause  you  are  liberal  5  be 
devout,  hecause  yon  are  free ;  be  pure,  hecause  you  are 
bold ;  cast  away  the  works  of  darkness,  hecause  you  are 
the  children  of  light ;  be  humble  and  considerate  and  for- 
bearing, hecause  you  are  charged  with  hopes  as  grand  as 
were  ever  committed  to  the  rising  generation  of  any 
Church  or  of  any  countr3^"  Any  man  who  talks  about 
him  as  if  the  essence  of  his  life  and  work  were  destructive 


354  ESSAYS  JXD  ADDIiESSES. 

lias  yet  to  learn  what  destruction  and  construction  mean 
— has  yet  to  master  that  great  truth  which  Stanley  him- 
self thus  nobly  states :  "  We  sometimes  think  that  it  is 
the  transitory  alone  which  changes;  the  eternal  stands 
still.  Rather,  the  transitory  stands  still,  fades,  and  falls 
to  pieces ;  the  eternal  continues  by  changing  its  form  in 
accordance  with  the  movement  of  advancing  ages." 

It  woidd  be  hard  to  name  any  man  in  these  days  who 
has  given  clearer  proof  of  a  true  love  for  the  Bible  than 
Dean  Stanley.  On  a  quiet  summer  Sunday  evening,  as 
you  sat  in  the  thronged  Abbey,  in  that  minghng"  of  the 
dajdight  from  without  and  the  church's  lamps  Avithin 
which  seemed  to  fill  the  venerable  place  with  a  saci-ed  and 
yet  most  familiar  beauty,  and  saw,  by  and  by,  as  the  ser- 
vice advanced,  that  small  live  figure  move,  during  the 
music  of  the  chant,  to  the  old  lectern,  and  read  the  chap- 
ter from  the  Old  Testament ;  as  you  heard  the  eager  voice 
lose  all  its  consciousness  of  time  and  place  as  it  passed 
on  into  the  pathos  of  the  story;  as,  at  last,  there  rang 
through  the  great  arches  the  wail  of  the  great  Hebrew 
monarch,  "  0  my  son  Absalom  !  my  son,  my  sou  Absalom  ! 
would  God  I  had  died  for  thee,  O  Absalom,  my  son,  my 
son  !  " — as  thus,  for  the  instant,  the  Dean  thrilled  himself 
and  filled  the  trembling  souls  of  those  who  heard  him 
with  the  passion  of  the  king,  you  felt  yourself  in  the  pres- 
ence of  a  love  and  reverence  for  the  Book  of  God  which 
was  deep  and  true  just  in  projiortion  as  it  was  free  from 
superstition  and  full  of  intelligence.  "  And  oh,  to  think," 
says  Canon  Farrar,  "  that  we  shall  never  hear  him  read 
again,  with  such  ringing  exultation,  the  Song  of  Deborah  ! " 
And  when  we  hear  the  Bishop  of  Gloucester  and  Bristol 
tell  how,  in  the  Revision  Committee,  the  Dean  would  often 
plead  for  the  preservation  of  an  "  innocent  archaism  "  in 
the  English  text,  we  catch  a  glimpse  of  his  love  for  the 
familiar  words  of  the  old  Ncav  Testament  Avliich  appeals 
to  the  hearts  of  multitudes  of  Euo-lish  Cliristians. 


DEAN  STANLEY.  355 

The  first  and  iudispensable  condition  of  the  Bible's 
power  is  that  the  Bible  should  be  ahve.  A  dead  book. 
Hke  a  dead  man,  slays  no  dragons.  And  to  how  many 
readers  Dean  Stanley's  works  have  made  the  Bible  live ! 
How  many  eyes,  fastened  upon  his  pages,  have  seen  gi'ad- 
uall}'  issuing  through  the  thin  substance  of  the  half-mj'th- 
ical  Moses  or  David,  in  whom  they  once  tried  to  believe, 
a  real  Moses  or  David — as  real  to  them  as  Moses  was  to 
Miriam,  or  David  was  to  Joab — and  have  found,  perhaps 
to  their  siu-prise,  that  it  was  in  those  real  human  Hves,  in 
men  and  women  troubled,  tormented,  loving,  hating,  sin- 
ning, repenting,  3'et  all  doing  something  to  make  possible 
the  days  of  the  Son  of  man  which  were  to  come — that  it 
was  in  such  human  lives  as  these  that  the  true  revelation 
of  God  to  man  in  the  Old  Testament  was  contained.  How 
many  a  reader  of  Stanley  has  felt  the  truth  of  these  words 
of  the  Dean  himself :  "  Can  aii}^  one  doubt  that  the  charac- 
ters of  David  and  Paul  are  better  appreciated,  more  truly 
loved,  by  a  man  like  Ewald,  who  ai)preciates  them  with  a 
13rof  ound  insight  into  their  language,  their  thoughts,  their 
customs,  their  histor}-,  than  by  a  scholastic  divine  from 
whom  the  atmosphere  in  which  the  king  and  the  apostle 
moved  was  almost  entirely  shut  out?"  It  would  be  little 
if  the  work  of  Stanley  had  simply  clothed  the  Bible  for 
man\'  readers  with  a  fascinating  interest.  It  is  surely  a 
debt  for  which  the  Christian  world  is  grateful  that  he  has 
called  forth  for  multitudes  its  sacredness  and  power,  and 
made  it  for  them  the  Book  of  Life. 

Nor  can  there  be  any  doubt  that  in  this  vividness  and 
sacredness  which  filled  the  life  of  the  Bible  and  all  human 
life  for  him,  there  lay  the  time  secret  of  that  prevailing 
silence  in  his  writings  with  regard  to  the  things  on  wliich 
theologians  ordinarily  dwell  most,  which  has  so  frequently 
been  observed  and  questioned.  The  miracle  of  life  to 
him  was  everywhere.  So  trul}^  was  the  hand  of  God 
apparent  in  the  building  of  the  nations,  in  the  guiding  of 


356  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  stream  of  history,  and  especially  in  the  education  of 
character  and  in  the  moral  progress  of  the  world,  that  in 
these  great  phenomena  he  found  the  truest  signs  of  his 
religion;  and  the  extraordinary  manifestations  of  divine 
power,  while  they  always  wakened  in  him  an  awe  peculiar 
to  their  own  mysteriousness,  while  they  were  dwelt  upon 
in  the  silence  which  often  marks  the  deepest  reverence, 
were  never  made  the  chief  objects  of  his  study,  nor  the 
supports  on  which  his  faith  relied.  ''  Let  us  recognize," 
he  said,  "that  the  preternatural  is  not  the  supernatural, 
and  that,  whether  the  preternatural  is  present  or  absent, 
the  true  supernatural  may  and  will  remain  unshaken." 
"  Not  by  outward  acts,  or  institutions,  or  signs  of  power, 
but  by  being  what  He  was,  has  the  history  of  Jesus  Christ 
retained  its  hold  on  mankind."  The  life  of  Christ  was  a 
life  "  sacred  and  divine,  because  it  was  supremely,  super- 
humanly,  and  transcendently  good."  Wlien  he  went  to 
Patmos  and  wrote  that  account  of  the  island  which  will 
always  make  the  vision  of  the  Apocalypse  more  vivid  and 
intelligible  to  any  one  who  reads  it,  it  was  still  the  vision- 
seer  more  than  the  vision  on  which  his  mind  was  dwelling, 
and  he  closes  his  account  by  saying,  "We  understand 
the  Apocalypse  better  for  having  been  at  Patmos.  But 
we  can  understand  the  Gospel  and  Epistles  of  St.  John  as 
well  in  England  as  in  Patmos  or  in  Ephesus,  or  even  in 
his  own  native  Palestine."  Surely  a  faith  like  this,  to 
which  all  ground  is  holy  and  all  days  are  the  days  of 
Christ,  and  man  lifted  to  moral  nobleness  and  purity  by 
God  is  the  great  miracle,  is  better  than  a  faith  which  only 
looks  afar  off,  and  finds  the  Avorld  of  men  around  it  and 
the  present  day  in  which  it  lives  barren  and  destitute  of 
God. 

It  is  hard  for  us  Americans  to  enter  fully  into  an  under- 
standing of  that  idea  of  the  national  Church,  of  religion 
as  a  true  function  of  the  Christian  State,  which  Stanley 


DEAN  STANLEY.  357 

learned  from  his  great  teacher,  Dr.  Arnold,  and  which 
pervaded  all  his  thinking  all  his  life.  But  when  he  comes 
himself  to  state  the  spiritual  meaning  of  his  idea,  he  takes 
us  into  his  sympathy  at  once.  ''  The  connection  of  the 
Church  with  the  State  is,"  he  says,  ''  merely  another  form 
of  that  great  Christian  principle — that  cardinal  doctrine 
of  the  Reformation,  which  is  at  the  same  time  truly  cath- 
olic and  truly  apostolical — that  Christian  life  and  Chris- 
tian theology  thrive  the  most  vigorously  not  by  separation 
and  isolation  and  secrecy,  but  by  intercommunion  with 
the  domestic  and  social  relations  of  man — in  the  world, 
though  not  of  it."  There  is  no  low  Erastianism  in  that 
high  interpretation.  And  we  always  must  remember  that 
Arnold,  deeply  as  Stanlej^  honored  him,  was  not  the  only 
influence  that  had  shaped  his  thought.  The  profounder 
and  more  spiritual  X'hilosophy  of  Frederick  Maurice  was 
freely  felt  and  owned.  It  is  really  the  Church-and-State 
theory  of  Arnold,  inspired  and  glorified  by  Maurice's  doc- 
trine of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  and  the  ongoing  of  the 
redemptive  life  of  man  in  Christ,  and  both  of  them  made 
clear  and  familiar  by  his  own  historic  sympathy  and 
never-failing  love  for  man,  that  one  feels  at  the  heart  of 
Stanley's  hope  for  his  country  and  for  the  world. 

No  one  who  heard  it  will  ever  forget  the  benediction 
wliich  Dean  Stanley  uttered  at  the  close  of  the  service  at 
which  he  preached  in  Trinity  Chm-cli  in  Boston,  on  the 
22d  of  September,  1878.  He  had  been  but  a  few  days  in 
America.  It  was  the  first  time  that  he  had  looked  an 
American  congregation  in  the  face.  The  church  was 
crowded  with  men  and  women,  of  whom  he  only  knew 
that  to  him  they  represented  the  New  World.  He  was 
for  the  moment  the  representative  of  English  Christianity. 
And  as  he  spoke  the  solemn  words,  it  was  not  a  clergy- 
man dismissing  a  congregation :  it  was  the  Old  World 
blessing  the  New ;  it  was  England  blessing  America.    The 


358  ESSAYS  A^^l)  aduuesses. 

voice  trembled,  while  it  grew  rich  and  deep,  and  took 
every  man's  heart  into  the  great  conception  of  the  act 
that  filled  itself.  The  next  morning  he  met  a  gather- 
ing of  clergymen  at  breakfast,  and  as  they  separated,  the 
room  for  an  instant  growing  qniet  and  sacred,  he  said, 
''  I  will  bid  you  farewell  with  the  benediction  which  I 
pronounced  yesterday  in  Trinity  Church,  and  Avhich  it  is 
my  habit  to  pronounce  on  all  the  more  important  occa- 
sions in  the  Abbey."  And  then  again  came  the  same 
words,  with  the  same  calm  solenniity.  When  he  stood 
where  now  he  himself  lies  buried,  and  had  watched  tlie 
dear  remains  of  his  wife — to  lose  whom  from  his  sight 
was  agony  to  him — committed  to  the  ground,  he  lifted  up 
himself  at  the  close  of  the  service,  and  with  a  clear  voice 
uttered  this  same  benediction.  And  once  again,  for  the 
last  time,  when  he  lay  waiting  for  the  end  in  the  deanery. 
Canon  Farrar  tells  us  how,  after  he  had  received  the  com- 
munion, the  voice  of  the  dying  Dean  was  heard  feebly 
blessing  his  friends,  and  blessing  the  world  that  he  was 
leaving,  with  the  same  benediction,  which  meant  so  much 
to  him.  Wherever  he  went,  whatever  he  did,  he  carried 
a  benediction  with  him. 

The  personal  charm  of  Dean  Stanley,  in  public  and  in 
private,  was  something  which  everybody  felt  who  came 
into  the  slightest  association  with  him.  Indeed,  it  seems, 
as  we  have  intimated,  to  have  been  felt  even  by  those 
who  never  saw  him,  and  who  knew  him  onty  through  his 
books  and  by  the  piiblic  record  of  his  life.  It  was  the 
charm  of  simple  truthfulness,  of  perfect  manliness,  of  a 
true  sympathy  with  all  forms  of  healthy  human  action, 
and  of  a  perpetual  pictiu-esqueness,  which  was  enhanced 
by  the  interesting  positions  which  he  held,  but  was  inde- 
pendent of  them,  and  had  its  real  being  in  his  person- 
ality itself.  If  he  had  been  the  humblest  country  parson 
instead  of  being  Dean  of  Westminster,  he  would  liave  ear- 


DEAN  STANLEY.  359 

ried  about  the  same  charm  in  his  smaller  world.  It  was 
associated  with  his  physical  frame,  his  small  stature,  his 
keeu  eye,  his  rapid  movemeut,  his  expressive  voice.  The 
very  absence  of  bodily  vigor  made  the  spiritual  presence 
more  distinct.  And  the  perfect  unity  of  the  outer  and  the 
inner,  the  public  and  the  private  life,  at  once  precluded 
any  chance  of  disappointment  in  those  who,  having  been 
attracted  by  his  work,  came  by  and  by  to  know  him  per- 
sonally, and  at  the  same  time  gave  to  those  whose  only 
knowledge  of  him  was  from  his  writings  and  his  public 
services  the  right  to  feel  that  they  did  really  know  him  as 
he  was. 

His  preaching  was  the  natural  expression  of  his  nature 
and  his  mind.  It  was  full  of  sympathy  and  of  historical 
imagination.  Apart  from  the  beautiful  simplicity  of  his 
style  and  the  richness  of  illustrative  allusion,  the  charm 
of  his  sermons  was  veiy  apt  to  lie  in  a  certain  way  which 
he  had  of  ti-eating  the  events  of  the  day  as  parts  of  the 
history  of  the  world,  and  making  his  hearers  feel  that  they 
and  what  they  were  doing  belonged  as  truly  to  the  history 
of  their  race,  and  shared  as  truly  in  the  care  and  govern- 
ment of  God,  as  David  and  his  wars,  or  Socrates  and  his 
teachings.  As  his  lectures  made  all  times  live  with  the 
familiarity  of  our  own  day,  so  his  sermons  made  our  own 
day,  with  its  petty  interests,  grow  sacred  and  inspired  by 
its  identification  with  the  great  principles  of  all  the  ages. 
With  the  procession  of  heroism  and  faith  and  bravery 
and  holiness  always  marching  before  his  eyes,  he  sum- 
moned his  congregation  in  the  Abbey  or  in  the  village 
church  to  join  the  host.  And  it  was  his  power  of  histor- 
ical imagination  that  made  them  for  an  instant  see  the 
procession  which  he  saw,  and  long  to  join  it  at  his  sum- 
mons. 

Such  a  life  as  we  have  tried  to  describe,  a  life  so  full  of 
faith  and  hope  and  charity,  could  not  but  be  a  very  happy 


o60  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

life.  All  his  friends  know — indeed,  all  the  world  which 
has  watched  him  knows — how  that  life  has  been  changed 
since  his  wife  died,  in  187G.  Lady  Angusta  Stanley — of 
whom  her  husband  wrote  upon  her  grave  that  she  was 
"for  thirty  years  the  devoted  servant  of  Queen  Victoria 
and  the  Queen's  mother  and  children,  for  twelve  years  the 
unwearied  friend  of  the  peoj)le  of  Westminster,  and  the 
inseparable  partner  of  her  husband's  toils  and  hopes, 
uniting  many  hearts  from  many  lands,  and  drawing  all  to 
things  above  " — left  the  home  to  Avhicli  her  life  had  given 
such  brilliancy  and  sweetness  ver}^  desolate  and  empty 
when  she  died.  And  yet,  with  all  his  most  pathetic  sor- 
row, there  was  a  richness  in  his  memory  and  thought  of 
her  after  her  death  that  was  not  destitute  of  happiness. 
'^  I  shall  be  there  when  he  takes  people  round  the  Abbey. 
I  shall  be  associated  with  all  his  Avorks."  So  she  had  said 
when  speaking  of  her  grave.  And  some  fulfilment  of  her 
hoiie,  some  coiistant  sense  of  sj^iritual  company,  gave  a 
peculiar  beauty  to  the  last  years  of  the  servant  of  God,  as 
he  still  lingered  till  his  work  was  done. 

The  feeling  of  Dean  Stanley  toward  Westminster  Ab- 
bey and  his  treatment  of  the  duties  and  privileges  which 
belonged  to  him  as  the  head  of  that  venerable  sanctuary 
have  been  full  of  poetry  and  beauty.  They  have  made 
the  last  seventeen  3'ears  of  his  life  a  poem  by  themselves. 
Westminster  Abbey  represented  to  him  the  religious  life 
of  England ;  and  in  its  abundant  suggestiveness  he  found 
illustrations  of  all  his  best  hopes  and  ideas  of  humanity 
and  of  the  Church.  More  and  more  his  whole  life  cen- 
tered there.  In  1865,  before  the  Society  of  Antiquaries, 
pleading  for  the  restoration  of  certain  neglected  parts  of 
the  great  building,  he  sai,d,  imitating  the  line  of  Terence, 
'■^ Decanus  Westmonasteriensis  sum;  nihil  ^Vestmonasteriense 
a  yne  aJienum  pnto.^^ 

To  walk  through  the  Abbey  Avith  the  Dean  Avas  like 


DEJX  STJXLET.  361 

walking  through  antiquity  with  Plutarch;  only  it  was  a 
Christian  Plutarch,  and  a  Plutarch  full  of  the  ideas  and 
aspirations  of  the  nineteenth  century,  as  well  as  tlie  mem- 
ory of  all  other  centuries,  with  whom  you  walked.  Now 
he  stopj)ed  by  the  tomb  of  Edward  the  Confessor,  in  the 
center  of  the  Abbey,  and  told  of  "  his  innocent  faith  and 
sympathy  with  the  people,"  which  give  the  childish  and 
eccentric  monarch  such  a  lasting  charm.  Now  he  paused 
before  the  often-mutilated  monument  of  Andre,  and  had 
a  Ivind  word  both  for  the  ill-fated  victim  and  the  great 
captain  who  reluctantly  condemned  him.  Now,  in  the 
center  of  the  nave,  he  would  let  no  one  pass  the  grave  of 
Li\angstone  without  reverence.  Now,  in  the  poets'  cor- 
ner, he  stood  beneath  the  quaint  memorial  of  "rare  Ben 
Jonson,"  and  told  the  fantastic  stories  of  his  burial  and  of 
the  strange  inscription.  Then,  in  Henry  VII.'s  chapel, 
he  would  point  to  the  Duke  of  Buckinghamshire's  monu- 
ment, and  recount  how  a  too  scrupulous  dean  had  made 
the  famous  inscription  heathen,  because  he  could  not  have 
it  made  Christian  in  just  the  words  he  wished,  and  so, 
"rather  than  tolerate  suspected  heresy,  admitted  the  ab- 
solute negation  of  Christianity."  A  moment  he  would 
linger  by  the  spot  where  Cromwell's  body  lay  for  three 
years,  till  the  silly  rage  of  the  Restoration  dragged  it 
away.  And  just  beyond  that  grave,  in  the  chapel  where 
the  Duke  of  Montpensier,  the  younger  brother  of  Louis 
Philippe,  king  of  the  French,  lies  buried,  there  is  the  stone 
beneath  which  he  now  sleeps  himself,  and  which  for  years 
he  never  approached  without  a  change  in  the  step  whielj 
any  one  walking  by  his  side  could  feel  at  once. 

The  anxiety  of  the  Dean  of  Westminster  that  all  the 
people  of  England,  as  far  as  possible,  should  know  the 
Abbey;  the  intense  interest  with  which  he  led  comj^anies 
of  working-men  and  working-women  through  its  aisles 
and  chapels ;  the  responsibility  which  he  felt  for  the  exe- 


362  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

ciition  of  his  office  as  the  guardian  of  its  dignity  and  the 
judge  of  who  should  be  admitted  to  its  courts  for  AvorshijD 
or  for  burial — all  these  show  in  how  lofty  a  way  he  loved 
it.  It  was  no  toy  for  him  to  play  with.  It  was  no  museum 
of  bric-a-brac  antiquity.  Nor  was  it  a  pedestal  for  him  to 
stand  on,  nor  a  frame  to  set  off  the  picture  of  his  life.  It 
Avas  the  image  of  the  sacredness  of  history  and  of  God's 
ways  in  England,  which  he  was  set  to  keep,  as  the  high- 
priests  of  the  Jews  were  set  to  keep  the  Books  of  the 
Kings  and  of  the  Chronicles.  When  he  was  willing  that 
the  monument  of  the  French  Imperial  Prince  should  be 
received  into  the  great  assembly,  it  was  not  a  certificate  of 
the  prince's  greatness  nor  an  indorsement  of  imperialist 
ideas  which  was  intended.  It  was  simply  that  the  death 
of  one  who  might  be  called  the  last  of  the  Bonapartes  in 
the  service  of  England  seemed  to  the  Dean  a  picturesque 
event,  worth}^  to  be  written  on  the  stone  taljlet  of  history 
which  was  in  his  keeping.  When  he  refused  the  use  of 
the  Abbey  for  an  official  meeting  of  the  Lambeth  Con- 
ference in  1867,  it  was  because  he  could  not  see  in  that 
assemblage  a  fair,  impartial  utterance  of  English  Chris- 
tianity. When  he  invited  Max  Miiller  to  lecture  in  the 
Abbey  upon  Christian  missions,  it  was  his  testimony  to 
the  truth  that  the  laity  really  are  the  English  Church,  and 
that  by  lay  intelligence  and  thoughtfulness,  as  well  as  by 
the  special  methods  of  knowledge  which  are  oj^en  to  the 
clergy,  the  questions  of  religion  must  be  approached  and 
answered.  "  So  long  as  Westminster  Abbey  maintains  its 
hold  on  the  affections  or  respect  of  the  English  Church 
and  nation,  so  long  will  it  remain  a  standing  proof  that 
there  is  in  the  truest  feelings  of  human  nature  and  in 
the  highest  aspirations  of  religion  something  deeper  and 
wider  than  the  partial  judgments  of  the  day  and  the  tech- 
nical distinctions  of  sects — even  than  the  just,  though  it 
may  for  the  moment  be  misplaced,  indignation  against 


DEAN  STANLEY.  363 

tlie  errors  and  sins  of  our  brethi'en."  In  words  like  these 
we  have  the  true  key  to  liis  treatment  of  the  great  na- 
tional trust,  which  he  never  mentioned  without  a  most 
impressive  seriousness. 

It  is  interesting  to  see,  in  his  dehghtful  work  upon  the 
Abbey,  what  are  some  of  the  incidents  in  the  history  of 
the  great  chui-ch  which  seem  to  give  him  pecidiar  pleasure. 
He  commemorates  the  fact  that  "  William  Caxton,  who 
first  introduced  into  Great  Britain  the  art  of  printing, 
exercised  that  art,  a.d.  1477  or  earlier,  in  the  Abbey  of 
Westminster."  Again,  he  recollects  with  pleasure  that 
the  injunction  under  Edward  VI.,  which  commanded  tlie 
sale  of  the  brass  lecterns  and  copper  gilt  candlesticks  and 
angels  "  as  monuments  of  idolatry,"  was  coupled  with  a 
direction  that  the  proceeds  should  be  devoted  "to  the 
library  and  the  bujdng  of  books."  Both  of  these  satis- 
factions are  characteristic  of  the  light-lover.  While  he 
records  the  execrations  which  the  gigantic  and  obtrusive 
monument  of  James  Watt  has  provoked  from  architec- 
tm-al  enthusiasts,  yet  he  himself  is  reconciled  to  it  by 
remembering  "what  this  vast  figure  represents — what 
class  of  interests  before  unknown,  what  revolutions  in  the 
whole  framework  of  society,  equal  to  any  that  the  Abbey 
walls  have  yet  commemorated."  When  he  was  installed 
as  Dean,  the  passage  in  the  service  which  most  startled 
his  ear  as  the  oracle  and  augury  of  his  new  work  was  that 
in  which  it  is  prayed  that  the  new-comer  may  be  enabled 
to  do  his  best  "  for  the  enlargement  of  God's  Church."  On 
December  21,  1869,  the  consecration  to  the  see  of  Exeter 
of  "  the  worthy  successor  of  Ai-nold  at  Rugby,  Dr.  Tem- 
ple, who,  after  an  opposition  similar  to  that  which  no 
doubt  would  have  met  his  predecessor's  elevation,  entered 
on  his  episcopal  duties  mth  a  burst  of  popular  enthusiasm 
such  as  has  hardly  fallen  to  the  lot  of  any  Enghsh  prelate 
since  the  Reformation,"  is  joyously  recorded  by  his  sym- 


364  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

pathizing  friend.  Everywhere  there  was  that  same  broad 
satisfaction  in  the  highest  uses  to  whicli  his  great  charge 
could  be  put  which  was  uttered  in  ahnost  the  last  articu- 
late words  which  were  taken  down  unaltered  from  his 
failing  sj)eecli — words  in  which  he  passed  most  naturally 
from  the  thought  of  his  own  personal  life  to  the  thought 
of  the  Abbey  in  whicli  he  had  lived.  "  The  end  has  come," 
he  said,  "in  the  way  in  which  I  most  desired  it  should 
come.  I  could  not  have  controlled  it  better.  After 
preaching  one  of  my  sermons  on  the  Beatitudes,  I  had 
a  most  violent  fit  of  sickness,  took  to  my  bed,  and  said 
immediately  that  I  wished  to  die  at  Westminster.  I  am 
perfectly  happy,  perfectly  satisfied ;  I  have  no  misgivings." 
And  again,  a  little  later  on  :  "  So  far  as  I  knew  what  the 
duties  of  this  office  are  supposed  to  be,  in  spite  of  every 
incompetence,  I  yet  humbly  trust  that  I  have  sustained 
before  the  mind  of  the  nation  the  extraordinary  value  of 
the  Abbey  as  a  religious,  liberal,  and  national  institution." 

However  men  have  questioned  other  burials  in  the 
Abbey,  there  is  no  doubt  about  his  right  to  be  buried 
there.  He  has  given  the  venerable  structure  a  deeper 
meaning,  and  therefore  a  deeper  sacredness,  to  countless 
minds.  His  use  of  the  building  of  many  centuries  for  the 
best  purposes  of  this  latest  century  in  which  he  lived  is 
a  true  picture  of  how  he  tried  to  make  the  unchanging 
Church  of  Christ  a  real  and  living  servant  of  this  modern 
time,  with  its  changed  needs  and  thoughts. 

The  short  and  hurried  visit  of  Dean  Stanley  to  the 
United  States  in  1878  will  be  long  remembered  here.  It 
is  not  too  much  to  say  that  more  than  any  Englishman 
of  distinction  who  has  visited  this  countrj^  he  entered 
into  sympathetic  understanding  of  its  life.  He  came  as 
an  historian  and  as  an  Englishman.  When  he  stood  upon 
the  hill  at  Plymouth,  and  took  in  with  wonderful  distinct- 
ness the  whole  scene  of  the  landing  of  the  Pilgrims ;  when 


DEAN  STANLEY.  365 

he  made  his  pilgrimage  to  Channiiig's  grave;  when  he 
stood  upon  the  spot  of  Andre's  execution,  and  conceived 
the  beautiful  inscription  which  he  afterward  wrote  out 
for  the  monument  to  be  erected  there — always  he  was  the 
historian  and  the  Englishman,  loving  to  trace  in  the  first 
settlement  of  the  country,  and  in  the  struggle  for  inde- 
pendence, and  in  the  growth  of  liberal  and  humane  Chris- 
tian thought,  the  tokens  in  the  New  World  of  that  same 
trusty  human  character  which  he  at  once  shared  and  hon- 
ored in  the  mother-country.  But  always,  besides  being 
the  historian  and  the  Englishman,  he  was  also  the  prophet 
and  the  man ;  ready  and  glad  to  recognize  that,  for  the 
State  and  for  the  Church  and  for  the  race,  God  had  ap- 
pointed a  work  here  in  America  which  could  be  done  only 
here,  and  so  honoring  our  country  not  simply  as  the  issue 
of  great  histories  in  the  past,  not  simply  as  the  echo  on 
new  shores  of  a  life  which  he  respected  and  loved  at 
home,  but  as  the  minister  of  unknown  works  for  God 
and  man  in  the  great  future,  as  containing  the  promise 
and  potency  of  sorts  of  life  in  the  days  to  come  which  she 
alone  could  furnish.  The  sketch  of  America  which  he 
wrote  in  a  magazine  article  on  his  return  was  very  remark- 
able for  its  observation  and  thoughtful  insight.  More 
than  ever,  since  that  visit,  the  deanery  and  the  Abbey 
have  been  open  to  Americans.  And  in  all  the  last  ser- 
vices in  which  he  took  part  there,  from  the  day  of  the 
murderous  assault  upon  President  Garfield,  prayers  were 
offered  in  the  Abbey,  by  the  Dean's  direction,  that  the  life 
of  the  American  President  might  be  spared  to  his  nation 
and  the  world. 

As  we  close  this  rapid  survey  of  Dean  Stanley's  life, 
can  there  be  any  doubt  what  are  the  lessons  which  he 
would  wish  to  have  it  teach  ?  Must  not  the  first  certainly 
be  this :  that  Christ  is  the  Lord  of  human  historj^,  and 
that  in  His  gospel  ai]d  His  Church,  ever  more  broadly 


3GG  i:SSJYS  AND  ADBEESSES. 

and  spiritually  conceived,  lies  the  time  hope  of  hnman 
l^rogress  and  the  true  field  of  hnman  work?  And  is  not 
the  second  this :  that  hnman  existence  is  full  of  crowded 
interest,  and  that  simplicit}^,  integrity,  the  love  of  truth, 
and  high,  unselfish  aims  must  make  for  any  man  in  whom 
they  meet  a  rich  and  happy  life  ? 

These  lessons  will  be  taught  by  many  lives  in  many 
languages  before  the  end  shall  come  ;  but  for  many  years 
yet  to  come  there  will  be  men  who  will  find  not  the  least 
persuasive  and  impressive  teachings  of  them  in  Dean 
Stanley's  life.  The  heavens  will  still  be  bright  with  stars, 
and  younger  men  will  never  miss  the  radiance  which  they 
never  saw.  But  for  those  who  once  watched  for  his  light 
there  will  always  be  a  spot  of  special  dai-kness  in  the 
heavens,  where  a  star  of  special  beauty  went  out  when 
he  died. 


ADDRESS  AT  THE  LAYING  OF  CORNER-STONE 
OF  THE  WELLS  MEMORIAL  WORKING-MEN'S 
CLUB  AND  INSTITUTE,  BOSTON,  MASS.,  MAY 
30,  1882. 

The  corner-stone  is  laid,  and  I  know  that  as  it  has  been 
laid  your  hearts  with  ours  have  asked  that  God's  bless- 
ing might  be  upon  it  and  upon  the  ceremonies  iu  which 
we  have  participated.  We  believe  that  this  building  for 
working-men  is  for  the  good  of  the  city  of  Boston.  We 
believe  that  this  institution,  while  it  sums  up  all  the  inspi- 
rations that  have  gone  before,  is  also  full  of  the  promise 
of  the  morning  and  the  springtime  that  is  yet  to  come. 
In  the  deep  and  earnest  sense  that  only  in  the  love  of 
God  could  we  fitly  plant  and  found  an  institution  such 
as  this,  there  lies  its  hope — in  its  profound  righteousness. 
In  the  earnest  sense  that  only  with  the  name  of  Christ 
written  upon  the  corner-stone  and  upon  its  toj)  stone  can 
it  succeed,  we  earnestly  look  forward  for  a  fruitfid  future 
for  it. 

I  cannot  help  thinking,  I  have  been  thinking  all  day,  as 
I  have  walked  about  these  streets  and  found  the  city  full 
of  the  stir  of  some  strange  emotion,  that  there  was  a  cer- 
tain fitness  that  we  should  come  here  and  in  the  closing 
hours  of  this  Decoration  Day  lay  the  corner-stone  of  the 
Wells  Memorial  Working-men's  Club  and  Institute  build- 
ing. There  is  a  singular  fitness  in  the  choice  of  this  day 
— this  day  in  which  our  whole  people  lift  up  their  voices 
and  praise  the  men  who  years  ago  gave  their  lives  for  the 

367 


368  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

salvation  of  our  country,  for  the  abolition  of  slavery,  and 
for  the  putting  down  of  the  rebellion. 

We  rejoice  that  upon  such  a  day  as  this  we  may  come 
and  take  onr  places  here  in  this  building,  while  garlands 
are  being  strewn  npon  the  graves  of  departed  heroes  and 
within  sound  of  the  music  that  sings  their  praises,  and  lay 
the  corner-stone  of  this  institution ;  so  that  the  flowers 
that  grateful  hearts  heap  above  the  soldiers  that  have 
long  been  dead,  and  the  fragrance  of  this  that  we  are  do- 
ing, mingle  together  not  nngratefnlly. 

We  have  a  great  united  country  to-day ;  we  have  a 
great  free  country,  in  which  men  may  come  together  for 
the  best  objects  for  which  men  strive,  thanks  to  those 
men  who  laid  down  their  lives  so  long  ago  that  the  young- 
est of  those  who  listen  to  me  now  do  not  remember  them. 
But  surely  all  of  you  have  heard  from  your  fathers  that 
within  the  lifetime  of  this  generation  there  have  been  men 
who  did  not  value  life  while  their  country  was  in  danger, 
and  who  went  willingly  to  lay  it  down  for  their  country's 
salvation.  It  would  mean  very  little  if  our  work  here  to- 
day began  here  ;  if  we  did  not  know  that  they  who  have 
fought  and  died  simply  made  our  work  possible ;  if  it 
were  not  possible  that  we  could  look  upon  our  work  sim- 
ply as  an  extension  of  their  work ;  if  it  were  not  possible 
that  we  could  look  upon  this  building  as  simply  the  battle- 
field that  comes  after  their  battle-field.  Tlie  same  great 
work  which  was  done  by  the  soldiers  in  the  war,  the  same 
great  work  that  has  been  done  by  all  great  and  bi-ave 
men,  is  still  being  continual^  done  by  men  in  the  new 
inspiration  in  the  work  of  our  own  times.  For  the  great 
battle  that  goes  on  through  the  ages  is  a  battle  that  is 
never  finished,  but  is  always  being  fought.  Each  new 
victory  but  opens  a  new  campaign. 

The  work  that  one  set  of  men  does  only  throws  open 
the  door  so  that  other  men  may  come  in  and  do  work 


THE  WELLS  MEMOBIAL  CLUB  AND  INSTITUTE.     3G0 

which  must  look  to  the  same  sources  of  inspiration  and 
have  the  same  sort  of  strength. 

You  who  are  to  do  the  work  which  will  be  done  in  this 
institution  are  engaged  in  the  same  battle.  You  are  to 
fight  the  same  battle  that  they  fought  who  laid  down  their 
lives  for  the  country  during  the  great  war  which  we  re- 
member. Just  as  during  that  war  when  the  army  came 
to  a  river  one  corps  which  could  do  the  special  work  of 
budding  bridges  or  laying  down  pontoons  were  sent  for- 
ward, and  when  they  had  done  their  work  retired,  and  the 
men  with  their  arms,  with  their  horses,  with  their  artil- 
lery, came  pressing  on  and  went  over  the  bridge  which 
the  corps  had  buOt,  so  one  generation  of  men  does  its 
special  work  and  passes  on — this  special  work  which  more 
or  less  lingers  afterward  in  history — then  the  next  gener- 
ation comes  to  do  like  work,  to  carry  on  the  same  cam- 
paign, to  follow  in  the  same  untu'ing  way,  winning  per- 
haps less  extensive  renown,  a  less  glorious  record  on  the 
page  of  history,  but  just  as  clear,  just  as  honored,  and 
just  as  loved  in  the  eye  of  Him  who  looks  at  the  real 
essence  of  our  work  and  cares  not  whether  men  call  it 
glorious  or  obscure. 

What  is  the  battle  that  is  to  be  fought  here  ?  In  the 
inspiring  words  of  your  president's  address  it  has  already 
been  explained  to  us.  The  battle  that  is  to  be  fought  out 
in  this  building  he  made  plain  to  us  when  he  bade  us 
think  of  those  things  that  are  to  be  cultivated  here,  when 
he  bade  us  remember  that  in  sobriety,  in  intelligence,  in 
industry,  in  skill,  in  thrift,  there  lay  the  great  salvation 
of  the  working-men ;  when  he  told  us  that  the  enemies  of 
the  working-man  were  intemperance,  the  yielding  to  his 
lusts,  the  giving  up  of  those  things  which  are  of  infinite 
value  for  those  which  are  of  immediate  value ;  unskilful- 
ness,  the  willingness  to  do  things  in  a  poor,  meager,  and 
shambling  way  instead  of  doing  them  in  the  best  and  finest 


370  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

way  in  which  they  can  be  done,  unthriftiness,  the  lavish 
hand  that  flings  far  and  wide  that  which  it  were  best  to 
keep — these  are  the  things  that  are  the  real  enemies  of 
the  working-men  to-day,  and  tlie  enemy  of  the  working- 
man  in  America  is  the  enemy  of  America. 

Just  as  truly  is  the  enemy  of  American  liberty  the  vices 
wliich  beset  our  working-men  as  were  those  men  who  a 
quarter  of  a  century  ago  lifted  up  their  hands  against  the 
government.  And  far  more  insidious,  far  more  difficult 
to  conquer.  With  these  enemies  the  great  conflict  is  to 
be  fought,  not  only  in  tliis  but  in  every  institution  like 
this,  and  in  the  lives  and  homes  of  the  working-men 
throughout  our  land.  To  us,  holding  these  views,  the 
laying  of  tlie  corner-stone  to-day,  it  seems  to  me,  is  the 
sounding  of  the  bugle  call  that  summons  the  army  into 
existence  that  is  to  fight  against  our  great  modern  enemies. 

You,  working-men  of  Boston,  must  set  your  faces 
against  those  great  enemies  of  whom  I  have  spoken — 
intemperance,  slotlifulness,  unskilfuhiess,  and  the  rest. 
It  is  because  this  building  is  to  be  used  for  the  education 
and  the  training  of  the  soldiers  for  this  new  army  in  this 
coming  war  that  we  rejoice  in  the  laying  of  this  corner- 
stone to-day. 

There  is  another  enemy,  of  lighter  weight  it  sometimes 
seems,  and  yet  which  does  certainly  strike  at  the  vitals  of 
the  working-man.  The  dark  and  heavy  brooding  care 
whicli  rests  upon  their  lives.  The  way  in  which  cheerful- 
ness seems  to  be  driven  out  of  their  experiences,  the  way 
in  which  discontent  becomes  fastened  in  their  minds — 
here  is  one  of  the  enemies  of  the  working-man  against 
which  this  club  sets  its  face.  With  its  great  army  of 
cheerfulness  it  sets  itself  against  the  dreadful  attacks  that 
this  enemy,  care  and  wretchedness,  is  always  bringing 
upon  our  working-men.  Against  uncheerfulness,  against 
unthriftiness,  against  wretchedness  and  poverty  this  chib 


THE  WELLS  MEMORIAL  CLUB  AXD  INSTITUTE.     371 

sets  its  face,  and  every  appliance  about  whicli  "vve  have 
heard  something  this  afternoon  is  but  the  detail  of  the 
way  in  which  the  soldiers  are  to  be  equipped  in  this  great 
fight. 

There  is  something  else  which  occurs  to  rae  as  forming 
an  analogy  between  the  old  war  which  has  been  fought 
and  the  new  war  which  we  are  now  waging.  There  was 
a  part  of  that  old  war  which  involved  no  blame  on  either 
side.  There  was  more  done  than  the  putting  do^Ti  of  a 
rebellion  which  we  believed  to  be  wi'ong.  There  was  the 
solving  of  problems  which  had  become  ver}-  difficult,  prob- 
lems which  especially  perplexed  our  national  life,  and  as 
we  see  them  now  it  seems  that  they  could  not  have  been 
solved  except  in  some  such  great  struggle  as  that  through 
which  we  passed  in  those  four  dreadful  years.  It  is  so 
still.  There  are  hard  questions  besetting  all  the  work- 
shops in  the  land,  questions  about  the  relations  of  the 
poor  man  to  the  rich  man,  and  of  the  rich  man  to  the 
poor  man ;  questions  about  the  relations  of  capital  to 
labor  and  labor  to  capital.  These  things,  which  employ 
the  best  thoughts  of  our  times,  must  find  their  ultimate 
settlement  in  the  lives  of  the  two  great  classes,  and  the 
way  in  which  they  are  adjusted  to  one  another  in  this  life ; 
and  if  the  working-men  of  our  country  can  live  worthier 
and  nobler  lives  they  not  merely  will  do  something  to  con- 
quer the  enemies  I  have  just  been  speaking  of,  but  they 
will  do  something  to  help  to  the  solution  of  these  great 
problems  that  seem  to  loom  up  with  such  danger  in  the 
future.  They  will  do  something  to  make  more  true  the 
relations  between  the  two  great  classes,  the  rich  and  the 
poor,  though,  thank  God,  there  is  no  fixed  barrier  between 
them,  because  the  poor  man  of  to-day  is  the  rich  man  of 
to-morrow,  and  the  rich  man  sometimes  becomes  poor,  so 
that  there  can  be  no  permanent  or  serious  danger  to  the 
community  in  which  these  two  classes  will  always  be. 


372  ESSJTS  AXD   ADDEESSES. 

This  building  would  mean  little  if  simply  the  working- 
men  of  Boston  in  the  future  years  might  come  and  have 
a  good  time  here.  It  would  mean  little,  surely,  if  they 
should  rest  content  in  the  discussion  of  such  Cjuestions  as 
the  tenure  of  the  working-man's  work.  But  we  will  not 
let  our  wishes  or  our  hopes  stop  short  of  the  belief  that 
in  this  work,  in  this  house,  and  in  the  occupations  that 
belong  to  it,  there  must  be  some  sort  of  light  thrown  upon 
the  puzzling  and  bewildering  questions  of  our  social  lives, 
of  the  relations  of  class  to  class,  of  the  way  in  which  men 
here  in  God's  great  world  are  to  live  and  work  together 
harmoniously,  notwithstanding  their  different  conditions. 

If  I  be  right  in  this  view,  and  if  the  war  which  was 
tliought  to  be  finished  seventeen  years  ago  is  not  finished 
yet,  but  has  come  down  to  us,  is  still  going  on  to-day,  and 
we  enter  into  our  part  of  it  in  this  new  experience,  which 
is  inaugurated  with  this  building,  then  this  certainly  is  a 
memorable  day.  We  learned  in  our  war  that  ultimately 
the  great  power  of  victory  must  always  rest,  not  in  the 
mere  equipment  of  the  army,  not  in  the  mere  advantage 
of  position,  not  in  the  mere  rapidity  of  the  movements  of 
the  troops,  but  the  ultimate  salvation  of  the  country  must 
depend  upon  the  character  of  the  soldier  himself.  If  that 
were  true  in  that  old  war  it  is  certainly  tnie  in  this  new 
war  of  which  we  are  speaking  now;  we  may  be  equipped 
as  completely  as  we  please,  we  may  make  our  aj^pliances 
as  efficacious  as  our  skill  can  make  them,  Imt  unless  the 
men  who  are  actually  to  do  the  fighting  with  the  enemies 
of  the  country — idleness,  iutemperance,  selfishness,  that 
prevails  throughout  our  city — unless  these  men  be  noble, 
manful,  consecrated  men,  all  our  appliances  will  fail. 

It  is  because  we  believe  that  the  men  who  have  under- 
taken this  work  are  such  consecrated,  manl.y,  noble,  lofty- 
minded,  and  religious  men  that  we  have  vast  hopes  for  a 
great  future  before  us  to-day.     If  the  old  times  needed 


THE  WELLS  MEMORIAL  CLUB  AND  INSTITUTE.     373 

men  of  iron,  the  new  times,  with  their  new  tasks,  need 
finer  men,  men  of  finer  temper,  in  whom  snbtler  elements 
have  been  mixed,  men  who  have  been  tried  in  hotter  fires. 
If  the  old  times  needed  men  of  iron,  the  new  times  need 
men  of  steel.  If  it  was  a  hard  thing  to  go  and  serve  one's 
country  in  the  fields  of  South  Carolina  and  Virginia,  it  is 
a  harder  thing  for  the  working-man  to  do  his  duty  now, 
by  himself,  by  his  country,  and  by  his  city,  and  by  his 
race,  in  the  toils  which  are  consecrated  in  this  building 
whose  corner-stone  we  have  just  laid.  Therefore  we  ask 
God's  blessing  to-day,  not  simply  upon  the  building,  but 
upon  the  men  who  ai-e  to  live  within  it.  We  ask  that  that 
God  from  whom  alone  can  come  true  joy  may  come  and 
make  this  place  one  of  abundant  happiness ;  that  that  God 
through  whose  power  alone  men  can  learn  completely  to 
control  their  appetites  may  come  and  make  this  house 
the  house  of  temperance ;  that  that  God  who  is  the  true 
Teacher  of  His  children  may  come  and  make  men  anxious 
to  do  tlieii-  work  in  the  most  skilful  and  thorough  way ; 
that  that  God  who  is  Father  of  us  all  may  teach  us  how 
to  live  our  daily  lives,  looking  up  and  looking  down,  and 
helping  all  alike  and  smoothing  the  path  of  life  for  all. 

The  enemies  that  we  have  got  to  fight  are  before  us 
on  the  field  in  this  ncAV  battle — all  Boston  is  full  of  them. 
Intemperance,  sloth,  selfishness,  are  here  before  us,  and 
the  great  question  with  aU  such  institutions  as  this  is 
whether  they  can  possibly  overtake  them,  whether  they 
can  fight  them  before  they  have  ravaged  the  field,  and 
turn  them  back  and  drive  them  away. 

Some  of  us  can  remember  how  from  the  Rappahannock 
up  through  Maryland,  into  the  very  heart  of  Pennsylvania, 
Meade  chased  the  invading  forces  of  Lee  over  the  fields. 
We  remember  the  two  days  of  Gettysburg,  how"  the  Fed- 
eral army  on  the  first  day  just  held  its  ground  and  how 
on  the  second  dav  the  tide  of  invasion  was  turned  back ! 


374  ESSAYS  AND  AVmiliSSES. 

It  was  a  critical  time.  We  had  been  chasing  the  enemy, 
who  had  got  the  start,  and  the  fight  was  with  an  enemy 
upon  the  soil  where  it  had  already  secured  its  position ; 
and  when  the  tidings  came  that  Lee  was  turned  back  into 
Maryland,  the  whole  country  lifted,  up  its  voice  in  cheers 
and  thanksgiving. 

So  you  will  find  that,  however  you  may  go  forward  in 
tlie  good  work,  the  enemy  is  on  the  soil  before  you,  that 
intemperance  and  ignorance  and  unthriftiness  and  infi- 
delity and  irreligion  and  selfishness  have  possession  of  the 
field  here  in  Boston  now.  God  grant  that  you  and  those 
who  come  up  afterwards  may  be  the  men  fitted  for  the 
occasion,  able  to  take  your  place  here  and  to  do  the  work 
that  tliose  men  began  twenty  years  ago  upon  the  field  of 
Cxettysburg. 

Where  is  the  Rej-nolds,  where  is  the  Meade,  that  is  to 
lead  the  army  in  this  new  and  redeeming  fight  against 
the  enemj^  that  has  already  possession  of  the  soil  ?  We 
do  not  trust  in  them  because  we  see  them,  but  because  we 
believe,  as  we  used  to  in  the  old  daj^s  of  war,  that  our 
cause  is  God's  cause ;  because,  therefore,  we  believe  that 
God  wiU  raise  up  the  men  to  do  the  work ;  because  we 
believe  He  has  called  men  and  set  them  into  the  front  of 
this  work,  which,  however  mighty  it  may  be  among  the 
multitudinous  vices  of  our  city,  we  look  upon  with  vast, 
earnest  hope ;  because  we  believe  that  God  is  behind  it 
do  we  to-day  look  forward  and  dare  to  anticipate  a  great 
future,  a  great  usefulness,  and  a  great  success  for  the 
Wells  Memorial  Working-men's  Institute.  May  God  our 
Father's  Nessing  rest  upon  it ;  may  it  draw  in  more  and 
more  the  sympathj^  of  the  working-men  of  the  city  in  the 
years  that  are  to  come,  and  may  we  afterward  look  back 
to  this  day,  when  we  laid  this  coruer-stone,  thankful  that 
there  was  in  our  time  faith  and  hope  enough  in  men  and 
in  God  to  start  an  institution  such  as  this. 


MARTIN   LUTHER. 

(Address  at  Celebration  by  the  Evangelical  Alliance  of  the  United 

States  of  the  Four  Hundredth  Aiuiiversary  of  his  Birth. 

New  York,  November  13,  1883.) 

The  noblest  moiiiiment  of  modern  Eui'ope  stands  in 
the  old  town  of  Worms,  erected  fourteen  years  ago  in 
memory  of  the  man  who  was  born  in  Eisleben  at  nine 
o'clock  on  the  evening  of  the  10th  of  November,  1483, 
four  hundred  years  ago  last  Saturday  night.  In  the  cen- 
ter of  the  group  stands  the  stately  effigy  of  Martin  Luther 
overtopping  all  the  rest,  and  around  liim  are  assembled 
the  forerunners,  the  supporters,  and  the  friends  of  him 
and  of  the  Reformation,  which  must  always  be  most  as- 
sociated with  his  name.  Savonarola,  Wickliffe,  Huss  and 
Waldo,  Frederick  the  Wise  and  Philip  the  Magnanimous, 
Philip  Melanehthon  and  John  Reuchlin,  the  city  of  Augs- 
burg with  her  palm-branch,  the  eitj-  of  Magdeburg  mourn- 
ing over  her  desolation,  and  the  city  of  Spires  holding 
forth  her  famous  protest — all  of  these  sit  or  stand  in  im- 
perishable bronze  around  the  sturdj^  doctor  who  was  the 
master  of  them  all. 

That  monument  at  Worms  but  represents  and  utters 
the  vivid  memory  in  which  the  great  Reformer  is  held 
not  merely  in  Germany,  but  through  aU  the  world  of 
Protestantism.  The  approach  of  the  anniversary  of  his 
birth  has  been  greeted  v/ith  an  overwhelming  welcome. 
The  old  German  towns  in  which  he  lived  have  reproduced 
in  pageants  and  processions  the  pictures  of  his  life.  His 
unforgotten  face  has  come  back  once  more  to  a.  thousand 

375 


376  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

homes.  His  books  have  been  re-read.  His  faults  and 
virtues  have  been  re-discussed.  His  place  and  power  in 
history  ha^-e  been  estimated  anew ;  and  the  whole  great 
portion  of  the  world  which  has  been  blessed  through  him 
has  thanked  God  once  again  that  he  was  born. 

At  such  a  time  the  voice  of  the  Protestants  of  America 
could  not  be  silent.  It  has  not  failed  to  speak  in  many 
ways,  and  now  to-night  we  have  assembled  at  the  sum- 
mons of  the  Evangelical  Alliance  to  do  honor  to  the  mem- 
ory of  Martin  Luther,  and  to  think  together  of  what  he 
was  and  did. 

We  are  to  think  of  one  of  the  greatest  men  of  human 
history.  I  say  advisedly  one  of  the  greatest  men  ;  for  at 
the  outset  we  ought  to  realize  that  it  is  the  personality  of 
Luther,  afire  with  great  indignations,  believing  in  great 
ideas,  writing  books  which  in  some  true  sense  are  great 
books,  doing  great,  brave,  inspiring  deeds,  but  carrying 
all  the  while  its  power  in  itself,  in  his  being  what  he  was 
— it  is  the  personality  of  Luther  whicli  reall}^  holds  the 
secret  of  his  powder.  It  is  he  that  men  hate  and  love  with 
ever  fresh  emotion,  just  as  they  loved  and  hated  him  four 
centuries  ago.  His  books  were  burned,  but  the  real  ob- 
ject of  the  hate  was  he.  His  pamphlets,  scattered  broad- 
cast over  Germany,  were  read  and  j^raised  and  treasured, 
but  the  real  love  and  loyalty  and  looking  up  for  power 
was  to  him.  Indeed,  the  name  and  fame  of  Luther  com- 
ing down  through  history  iinder  God's  safe-conduct  has 
been  full  of  almost  the  same  vitality,  and  has  been  at- 
tended by  almost  the  same  admiration  and  abuse,  as  was 
the  figure  of  Luther  in  that  famous  journey  whicli  took 
him  in  his  rude  Saxon  wagon  from  Wittenberg  to  Worms 
when  he  went  up  to  the  Diet ;  and  at  Leipzig,  Niirnberg, 
Weimar,  Erfurt,  Gotha,  Frankfiirt,  the  shouts  of  his 
friends  and  the  curses  of  his  enemies  showed  that  no 
man  in  Germany  was  loved  or  hated  as  he  was. 


MARTIN  LUTHER.  377 

It  is  this  vigorous  and  personal  manhood  which  is  the 
strength  of  Luther,  and  if  we  analyze  it  a  little  we  can 
see  easily  enough  out  of  what  two  elements  it  was  made 
up,  or,  more  properly,  perhaps,  in  what  two  channels  it 
ran  and  made  its  strength  effective.  Both  are  distinct- 
ively religious.  There  are  two  sentences  out  of  two  para- 
bles of  Jesus  which  describe  indeed  the  two  components 
of  the  strongest  strength  of  all  religious  men.  One  is 
this,  from  the  parable  of  the  vine3^ard :  "  When  the  time 
of  fruit  grew  near,  the  lord  of  the  vineyard  sent  his  ser- 
vants to  the  husbandmen  that  the}'  might  receive  the 
fruit  of  the  vineyard ;  "  and  the  other  is  the  cry  of  the 
returning  prodigal :  "  I  will  arise  and  go  to  my  father." 
Put  these  two  together  into  any  deep  and  lofty  soul  (3^ou 
cannot  put  them  into  any  other),  and  what  a  strength 
you  have !  The  consciousness  of  being  sent  from  God 
with  a  mission  for  which  the  time  is  ripe,  and  the  con- 
sciousness of  eager  return  to  God,  of  the  great  human 
struggle  after  Him,  possessing  a  nature  which  cannot 
live  witliout  Him — tlie  imperious  commission  from  above 
and  the  tumultuous  experience  within — these  two,  not 
inconsistent  with  each  other,  have  met  in  all  the  great 
Christian  workers  and  reformers  who  have  moved  and 
changed  the  world.  These  two  lived  together  in  the  whole 
life  of  Luther.  The  one  spoke  out  in  the  presence  of 
the  emperor  at  Worms.  The  other  wrestled  unseen  in 
the  agonies  of  the  cloister  cell  at  Erfm-t.  The  broad  and 
vigorous  issue  of  the  two  displayed  itself  in  the  exalted 
but  always  healthy  and  generous  humanity  which,  with 
pervasive  sjanpathy,  filled  and  embraced  all  the  hunumity 
about  it,  not  as  persuasions  or  convictions — that  would 
not  have  worked  any  such  result — but  as  the  living  forces 
which  exalted  and  refined  and  consecrated  and  enlarged  a 
nature  of  great  natural  nobility  and  richness.  So  it  was 
that  the  sense  of  the  divine  commission  and  the  profound- 


378  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

ness  of  the  human  struggle  created  the  Lnther  who  shook 
the  thrones  of  pope  and  C^sar  and  made  all  Europe  new. 
You  need  only  look  into  the  faces  of  Hans  Luther  and  his 
wife  Margaret,  which  hang,  painted  by  Lucas  Cranach,  in 
the  Luther  Chamber  at  the  Wartburg,  and  you  will  see 
how  you  have  only  to  add  the  fine  fire  of  a  realized  com- 
mission and  a  remembered  struggle  to  the  rugged  German 
strength  of  the  father  and  the  human  sweetness  in  the 
mother's  eyes,  and  you  will  have  the  full  life  of  their  great 
son. 

It  was  in  conformity  to  this  fundamental  character  of 
Luther's  greatness,  his  large  humanity  inspired  by  the 
consciousness  of  his  mission  and  the  depth  of  his  personal 
struggle  after  God,  that  he  found  his  true  place  among 
the  great  Reformers,  as  theu*  leader,  and  yet  as  one  who 
needed  the  supplementing  help  of  others  to  make  up 
the  total  work.  Every  complete  and  permanent  religious 
movement  will  have  its  moralists,  its  mystics,  its  theolo- 
gians, its  ecclesiastics,  and  its  politicians.  Of  these  char- 
acters Luther  really  possessed  only  the  first  two.  He  was 
not  proper]}^  a  theologian ;  John  Calvin  was  that.  The 
English  reformers  were  ecclesiastics.  Zwingle  was  the 
politician.  But  Luther  was  the  moralist  and  the  mystic. 
Direct,  eternal  righteousness,  and  the  communion  of  the 
soul  with  God,  these  were  the  powers  by  which  he  lived, 
the  prizes  for  which  he  fought.  When,  with  his  soiil 
indignant  against  poor  Tetzel  and  his  wi'etched  indul- 
gences, he  nailed  his  theses  on  the  church-door  at  Witten- 
berg, he  was  the  moralist.  It  was  for  righteousness  that 
he  spoke  out.  And  it  was  to  Tauler  and  to  the  Theologia 
Germanica,  the  mystic  oracles,  that  he  always,  among  all 
writers,  gave  his  love  and  looked  for  his  inspiration. 

These  are  the  universal  human  elements  of  religious 
strength  and  character.  The  theologian  may  be  far  sepa- 
rated from  humanity,  the  mere  arranger  of  abstract  ideas. 


MARTIN  LUTHER.  379 

The  ecclesiastic  may  be  quite  unhuman  too,  the  manager 
of  intricate  machineries.  But  the  man  who  is  truly  mor- 
alist and  mystic  must  be  full  of  a  genuine  humanity.  He 
is  the  prophet  and  the  priest  at  once.  He  brings  the  eter- 
nal Word  of  God  to  man,  and  he  utters  the  universal  cry 
of  man  to  God.  Nothing  that  is  human  can  be  strange 
to  him,  and  so  nothing  that  is  human  can  count  him  really 
strange  to  it.  David,  Isaiah,  John  the  Baptist,  Paul — 
nay,  let  us  speak  the  highest  name,  Jesus,  the  Christ  Him- 
self— these  elements  were  in  them  all.  Grace  and  truth, 
faith  and  conscience,  met  in  them  and  made  their  power. 
These  elements  united  in  our  Luther,  and  so  it  was,  as  the 
result  of  them,  that  he  inspired  humanity  and  moved  the 
souls  of  men  and  nations  as  the  tide  moves  the  waves. 

If  the  opposite  had  not  been  sometimes  suggested,  it 
would  seem  needless  to  say  that  the  movement  which  we 
associate  witli  Luther  was  preeminently  and  essentially 
religious.  It  reached  out  to  many  most  various  interests 
of  man.  It  enlisted  all  of  men's  strongest  motives  in  its 
aid.  It  made  the  electors  of  Saxony  and  the  landgrave 
of  Hesse  its  servants.  It  sent  out  the  translated  Bible  as 
the  standard  and  source  of  German  literature.  It  laid 
the  deepest  foundations  of  German  unity.  It  was  so  wide 
that  Avhen  last  year  Haeckel  the  Darwinian,  the  apostle 
of  the  newest  science,  described  in  glowing  eidogy,  at 
Eisenach,  before  the  naturalists  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
the  triumphs  of  the  great  English  scientist,  he  could  find 
no  stronger  statement  than  to  say  that  Darwin  had  carried 
on  the  work  of  Luther  and  that  evolution  was  the  new 
reformation  doctrine.  Luther  himself  never  forgot  his 
love  for  learning,  and  carried  his  Plautus  and  his  Virgil 
with  him  into  the  cloister.  All  this  is  true.  And  yet  the 
soul  and  power  of  Luther  and  of  his  Reformation  was 
religion.  The  service  of  God  and  the  communion  with 
God,  these  made  his  conscious  strength.     The  very  gro- 


380  i:SSATS  AND  ADDUESSES. 

tesque  and  almost  horrible  intensity  with  which  he  hated 
the  hiiniauists,  the  disciples  of  the  renascence  who  were 
not,  or  whom  he  thought  not  to  be,  religious,  shows  liow 
he  made  religion  the  center  and  heart  of  all.  "  Erasmus 
of  Rotterdam,"  he  cries,  "  is  the  vilest  miscreant  that  ever 
disgraced  the  earth."  "  He  is  a  ver}'  Caiaphas."  '^  When- 
ever I  pray  I  pray  for  a  curse  upon  Erasmus."  Erasmus 
was  no  pagan,  but  he  was  not  Christian  enough  for  Lu- 
ther, therefore  he  won  these  terrible  denunciations.  To 
take  religion  out  of  the  Protestant  Reformation  is  to  take 
the  sun  out  of  the  sunshine  ! 

And  then  again,  writers  dispute  about  whether  the  Ref- 
ormation belonged  to  Luther  or  Luther  to  the  Reforma- 
tion. They  ask  whether  he  created  the  great  change 
which  came,  or  only  led  it,  as  the  first  wave  which  the  in- 
coming tide  drives  before  the  other  waves  on  to  the  beach 
is  the  leader  of  the  rest.  It  is  a  useless  question.  Little 
indeed  and  very  transitory  the  Reformation  would  have 
been  if  it  had  been  any  one  man's  work.  The  work  of  a 
great  man  cannot  be  so  separated  from  the  humanity  of 
which  he  forms  a  part,  in  which  as  well  as  for  which  he 
is  laboring,  which  moves  and  conquers  in  him.  Luther 
himself,  with  his  double  relation  always  realized — Luther 
himself,  the  man  of  sympathy  with  man  and  of  j)i"ayer  to 
God — Luther  would  ever  be  the  last  to  claim  that  he  cre- 
ated any  great  movement  of  humanity  under  the  will  of 
God.  And  yet  if  ever  one  man's  personality  was  promi- 
nent and  powerful  in  a  great  crisis,  it  was  his  here.  Once 
at  Weimar  he  found  Melanchthon  very  ill.  His  ej^es  were 
dim,  his  tongue  faltering,  his  understanding  almost  gone. 
"Alas,"  complained  Luther,  "that  the  devil  should  have 
thus  uu  strung  so  fine  an  instrument."  Then  he  knelt 
down  beside  his  sick  friend  and  prayed.  Then  he  stood 
up  beside  his  friend  and  cried,  "Be  of  good  courage, 
Philip ;  you  shall  not  die."    "  It  is  God's  delight  to  impart 


MAETIX  LUTHER.  381 

life,  not  to  inflict  death."  "  Trnst  in  the  Lord,  who  can 
impart  new  Hfe."  When  Mehmchthon  gets  well,  what 
physician  dwelling  on  the  power  of  nature,  what  Christian 
praising  the  power  of  God,  wiU  exclude  the  power  of  Lu- 
ther's healthy  personality,  of  his  robust,  majestic  manhood, 
from  its  share  in  the  restoration  of  the  gentle  scholar? 
And  as  he  gave  life  to  Melanehthon,  so  he  gave  it  to  the 
religion  of  the  gospel,  sick  almost  to  death  and  very  full 
of  desolation  and  despair. 

If  v>-e  look  for  a  few  moments  at  the  causes  which  Lu- 
ther especially  loved  and  for  which  he  spent  his  life  in 
batthng,  we  shall  see,  I  tliink,  how  his  loyalty  to  them 
confirms  what  I  have  just  been  saying.  He  is  the  cham- 
pion of  two  great  truths :  the  freedom  of  the  human  in- 
telligence, and  of  justification  by  faith.  These  are  the 
watchwords  on  his  banner.  With  these  two  war-cries 
ringing  from  his  trumpet  he  has  come  in  masterful 
strength  down  the  ages. 

Let  us  look  at  them  both.  What  was  it  Luther  meant 
when  in  the  face  of  pope  and  council  he  insisted  that  the 
human  intelligence  must  be  freed?  "Unless  I  be  con- 
victed of  error  by  the  Scriptures  or  by  powerful  reasons, 
neither  can  nor  will  I  dare  to  retract  anything.  Here 
stand  I.  I  can  do  no  otherwise,  God  help  me."  Oh 
the  power  and  revelation  of  that  word.  Dare  !  It  was  the 
serious  utterance  of  a  brave,  religious,  human  soul.  So 
it  has  appealed  to  all  human  souls  always.  But  it  was 
the  utterance  of  a  soul  conscious  of  God  and  of  its  own 
mysterious  self.  "  I  dare  not  retract,"  it  said.  It  was  no 
outburst  of  wilfulness.  The  two  compulsions,  the  com- 
pulsion to  tell  God's  truth  to  men  and  the  compulsion  to 
come  near  to  God  Himself,  held  him  so  fast  that  he  could 
not  escape.  There  was  no  wilfulness.  It  was  not  that  he 
woiild  not  be  the  slave  of  authority.  He  did  not  dare  to 
be.     It  was  not  so  much  that  he  refused  the  obedience  of 


382  ESSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

meu,  as  that  he  gave  himself  heart  and  soul  to  the  obe- 
dience of  God.  True,  he  had  not  escaped  from  the  old 
belief  that  there  must  be  somewhere  on  the  earth  an  in- 
fallible utterance  of  the  will  of  God ;  and  when  he  revolted 
against  pope  and  council,  he  clothed  the  Bible  with  the 
oracular  authority  which  had  belonged  to  them ;  but  all 
the  time  behind  the  Bible  lay  the  intense  conviction  of 
the  rights  and  claims  of  his  own  conscience  and  his  own 
soul,  the  moral  and  the  mystic  sense,  which  keep  life  nobly 
free  in  the  devout  acceptance  of  supreme  authority.  And 
Luther's  bibliolatry  was  always  of  a  spiritual  and  reason- 
able, never  of  a  mechanical  and  superstitious  sort. 

And  then  think  of  his  favorite  dogma — justification  by 
faith.  Tetzel  came  peddling  his  indulgences  in  Witten- 
berg market-place.  "Buy  one  of  these,"  he  said,  "and 
God  will  bless  you.  God's  minister  in  Rome,  Leo  X.,  as- 
sures you  of  it."  Disguise,  explain,  soften  it  as  you  will 
by  all  the  subtle  commentaries  of  the  Romish  doctors, 
that  was  what  the  peasants  of  the  Elbe  country  under- 
stood when  the  eager  monk  offered  them  the  precious 
piece  of  paper  and  reached  his  hand  out  for  their  money. 
Against  that  the  whole  soul  of  the  moralist  and  mystic 
rose  in  protest.  •  The  moralist  declared  that  it  was  not 
true,  and  that  to  promise  that  God  would  give  for  money 
those  blessings  which  belonged  only  to  character  and 
goodness,  was  to  degrade  morality  and  oj^en  the  floodgate 
to  all  wickedness.  The  mystic  took  a  still  deeper  tone. 
To  him  the  whole  picture  of  man  bargaining  with  God 
was  an  abomination.  God  and  the  soul  are  infinitely 
near  to  each  other.  God  is  in  the  soul.  The  soul  also  is 
in  God.  In  a  great  free  confidence,  in  perfect  trust,  in 
the  realization  of  how  it  belongs  to  Him,  in  unquestioning 
acceptance  of  His  love,  the  soul  takes  God's  mercy  and 
God's  goodness  into  itself  in  virtue  of  its  very  belonging 
to  Him.     Not  by  a  bargain  as  when  you  buy  your  goods 


MARTIN  LVTHER.  383 

across  the  counter,  but  b}^  an  openness  and  •willingness 
which  realizes  the  oneness  of  your  life  with  God's,  as  when 
the  bay  opens  its  bosom  to  the  inflow  of  the  sea,  so  does 
your  soul  receive  the  grace  of  God.  However  he  may 
have  stated  it  in  the  old  familiar  forms  of  bargain,  this 
was  Luther's  real  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith.  It 
was  mystic,  not  dogmatic.  It  was  of  the  soul  and  the 
experience,  not  of  the  reason.  Faith  was  not  an  act,  but  a 
being — not  what  j^ou  did,  but  what  you  were.  The  whole 
truth  of  the  immanence  of  God  and  of  the  essential  be- 
longing of  the  human  life  to  the  divine — the  whole  truth 
that  God  is  a  power  in  man  and  not  simply  a  power  o\'er 
man,  building  him  as  a  man  builds  a  house,  guiding  him 
as  a  man  steers  a  ship,  this  whole  truth,  in  wdiich  lies  the 
seed  of  all  humanity,  all  progress,  all  great  human  hope^ 
lay  in  the  truth  that  justification  was  by  faith  and  not 
by  works.  No  wonder  that  Luther  loved  it.  No  Avonder 
that  he  thought  it  critical.  No  w^onder  that  he  wTote  to 
Melanchthon,  hesitating  at  Augsburg,  "Take  care  that 
you  give  not  up  justification  by  faith.  That  is  the  heel 
of  the  seed  of  the  Avoman  which  is  to  crush  the  serpent's 
head." 

As  we  see  thus  the  moralist  and  mystic  meeting  in  the 
most  powerful  personality  of  modern  histor}^,  what  shall 
we  say?  Is  it  not  true  that  every  powerful  humanity 
which  shall  profoundly  affect  the  life  of  men  and  open 
new  futures  for  the  race  must  bear  united  in  itself  these 
elements  of  power  ?  All  the  great  human  forces  become 
the  servants  of  the  man  who  carries  in  himself  the  powers 
of  righteousness  and  the  power  of  communion  with  God. 
Just  as  the  three  chief  political  friends  of  Martin  Luther 
were  Frederick  the  Wise,  John  the  Steadfast,  and  Philip 
the  Magnanimous,  so  these  three  qualities  in  man,  wisdom 
and  steadfastness  and  magnanimity,  will  always  be  the 
willing  friends  and  servants  of  him  wdio  brings  the  spirit 


3f^4  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

of  ■aucoiupromisiug-  righteousness  and  the  spirit  of  devout 
communion  with  the  Infinite  and  the  Eternal  to  claim 
their  loyalt}'.  If  his  be  a  great  nature  he  ^vill  do  great 
things.  If  he  come  at  the  turning  of  the  tide  he  will 
stand  forever  as  one  of  the  cardinal  figm-es  of  history ; 
but  whether  his  personal  genius  be  great  or  small,  whether 
he  come  in  the  darkness  or  in  the  light,  the  man  who  is 
passionate  for  righteousness  and  who  loves  God  will  do 
things  of  the  first  and  finest  sort,  and  will  leave  his  influ- 
ence, read  or  unread,  upon  the  story  of  his  race,  for  he 
alone  is  truly  human.  He  alone  holds  his  soul  open  Ijoth 
to  God  and  man.  He  alone  catches  and  repeats  the  true 
•power,  human  and  divine,  of  Jesus  Christ.  The  stars  in 
their  courses  fight  for  him.  He  is  in  league  with  the  eter- 
nal order  and  the  eternal  light.  Tlie  empire  of  Charles  V. 
may  fall  to  pieces,  the  learning  of  Erasmus  may  grow 
obsolete,  the  splendor  of  Leo  may  become  tawdry,  the 
theology  of  Calvin  may  be  disproved,  but  the  humanity 
of  Luther,  strong  with  the  enthusiasm  of  righteousness 
and  the  pi'csent  love  of  God,  will  be  a  spell  to  hold  the 
hearts  of  men  when  many  more  than  four  centuries  shaU 
have  passed  away. 

One  more  word  while  I  speak  thus  in  general  of  the 
large  humanity  of  Luther  as  the  true  secret  and  substance 
of  his  power.  A  large  humanit}'  is  many-sided,  and  must 
have  its  genial  and  gracious  and  domestic  exhibitions 
as  well  as  its  awful  warnings  and  imperious  commands. 
The  vdnd  that  shakes  the  forests  sings  its  wordless  songs 
through  the  sweet  and  pathetic  strings  of  the  harp  in  the 
house  window.  If  it  was  true  humanity  that  thundered 
its  determination  "to  enter  Worms  although  as  many 
devils  should  set  at  me  as  there  are  tiles  upon  the  house- 
tops," it  was  the  same  humanity  which  loved  to  play  be- 
side the  Christmas-trees  with  little  children,  which  turned 
the  cloister  of  Wittenberg  into  a  Christian  home,  which 


MARTIN  LUTHER.  385 

talked  the  language  of  the  (iommou  folk  and  would  not 
refuse  the  humblest  of  their  idioms  a  place  in  his  transla- 
tion of  the  Word  of  God,  which  kept  the  human  painter 
Lucas  Cranach  by  his  side  to  turn  his  thoughts  to  pictures, 
and  which  ran  over  with  melodious  hymns  that  have  be- 
come the  lyrics  of  his  people's  life  as  a  fountain  overruns 
with  water.  Moses  and  David  both — what  a  true  son  of 
man  he  was  !  We  saw  how  he  could  thunder  with  most 
uncomely  rage  at  Erasmus.  None  the  less  he  could  sink 
down  in  weariness  and  cry  pathetically  beside  the  grave 
of  one  of  his  old  brother-monks  at  Erfurt.  ■'  How  calml}^ 
he  sleeps,  and  I,"  he  went  to  Worms  saying — "I  will  cou- 
fess  yet  in  Behemoth's  mouth  between  his  great  teeth." 
But  they  who  sat  and  Avatched  in  the  next  room  the  night 
before  he  stood  in  the  presence  of  the  Diet  heard  the 
great  sobs  which  shook  his  mighty  frame  and  the  passion- 
ate prayers  with  which  he  called  out  to  God  for  help  in 
weakness.  He  was  the  father,  the  creator  of  a  literature, 
and  yet  no  writer  was  ever  less  the  literary  man.  He 
never  wrote  but  for  a  purpose.  ''  His  prose,"  saj^s  Richter, 
"  is  a  half  battle."  Whether  the  story  on  the  Wartburg 
be  a  true  tale  or  a  false  legend,  he  was  always  throwing 
his  inkstand  at  the  devil.  In  that  devil  he  believed  with 
a  child's  simple  faith  and  a  brave  man's,  nay,  a  true  saint's, 
fearlessness.  He  was  a  supernaturalist  for  whom  nature 
was  all  the  more  dear  and  interesting  because  of  the  great 
forces  which  he  felt  working  in  it.  In  him  was  that  after 
which  Christianity  is  alwaj's  struggling,  that  of  which 
Christ  is  the  pattern  and  the  consummation,  a  humanity 
which  was  all  the  more  human  because  of  its  immediate 
and  uninterrupted  consciousness  of  Divinity. 

Some  men  are  events.  It  is  not  what  they  say  or  what 
they  do,  but  what  they  are,  that  moves  the  world.  Luther 
declared  great  truths ;  he  did  great  deeds ;  and  yet  there 
is  a  certain  sense  in  which  his  words  and  deeds  are  valu- 


38 G  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

able  only  as  they  sliowed  him,  as  they  made  manifest  a 
son  of  God  living  a  strong,  l)i'ave,  clear-sighted  human 
life.  It  is  thus  that  I  have  spoken  of  him  so  far,  feeling 
his  presence  still  through  the  deep  atmosphere  of  these 
four  hundred  years.  It  is  not  certainly  as  the  founder  of 
any  sect ;  more,  but  not  mostly,  it  is  as  the  preacher  of 
certain  truths ;  but  most  of  all  it  is  as  uttering  in  his  very 
being  a  reassertion  of  the  divine  idea  of  humanity,  that 
he  comes  with  this  wonderfully  fresh  vitalit}^  into  our 
modern  days. 

But,  when  we  set  ourselves  to  look  at  it  more  in  its  de- 
tails, what  a  life  of  word  and  work  it  was  through  which 
his  spirit  found  its  education  and  sent  forth  its  force  into 
the  world !  His  father,  the  Thuringian  miner,  lived  in 
the  little  town  of  Mansfeld,  and  out  of  the  hills  he  won 
with  constant  toil  the  money  to  send  his  bright,  sturdy 
little  boy  to  school.  The  young  Luther  got  his  earlier 
education  at  Magdeburg  and  Eisenach.  When  he  was 
eighteen  years  old  he  went  to  the  University  at  Erfurt 
and  studied  classics  and  philosophy.  And  then  there 
came  the  change.  Some  sudden  shock,  perhaps  the  sick- 
ness of  a  friend,  perhaps  the  storm  of  thunder  and  light- 
ning, sent  him  into  the  Augustinian  cloister  and  he  be- 
came a  monk.  His  old  father  protested,  but  it  did  no 
good.  Buried  out  of  sight  for  the  next  three  years,  he 
wrestled  for  his  soul's  life.  The  fiercest  mental  strug- 
gle went  on  in  his  solitary  cell.  '^  I  tormented  myself  to 
death,"  he  said,  "  to  make  my  peace  with  God,  but  I  was 
in  darkness  and  found  it  not."  Then  he  was  sent  to 
Wittenberg  to  teach  in  the  new  university.  The  fire  was 
in  his  heart.  The  unsatisfied  restlessness  filled  his  soul. 
Then  he  went  up  to  Rome  and  saw,  as  all  the  world  re- 
members, how  there  was  no  satisfaction  for  him  there. 
As  he  came  back,  now  twenty-nine  years  old,  the  light 
bega.i  to  dawn.     The  Bible  revealed  its  heart  to  him. 


MARTIN  LUTREB.  387 

"  The  just  shall  live  by  faith  "  seemed  to  ring  out  to  him 
the  divine  answer  to  all  his  agonies  and  doubts.  Then, 
five  years  later,  Tetzel  came  with  his  indulgences,  and  Dr. 
Martin  Luther  walked  down  the  old  main  street  of  Wit- 
tenberg and  nailed  his  Reformation  theses  on  the  door  of 
the  Castle  Church  on  All  Saints'  Eve,  the  81st  of  October, 
1517.  There  they  are  to-day  on  the  door  of  the  same 
church  cast  in  perpetual  bronze.  Think  what  a  j'outli 
that  was  !  What  a  great  preparation  for  a  life  !  Three 
scenes  stand  out  in  it  forever :  the  meadow  just  outside 
of  Erfurt  where,  in  the  fury  of  the  storm,  with  the  light- 
ning striking  at  his  feet,  he  resolved  that  he  woidd  be  a 
monk;  the  Augustinian  convent  where  he  fought  over 
tlie  new-found  Bible  for  his  soul;  and  the  church-door 
where  he  nailed  up  his  theses  against  the  indulgences  of 
the  po})e.  The  scenes  of  resolution,  of  struggle,  and  of 
first  decided  action — the  tliree  Epij)hanies  of  every  open- 
ing life  of  power. 

The  year  1517,  with  which  the  first  period  ends  and  the 
second  period  begins,  was  the  explosive  year  of  Luther's 
life.  Then  the  nuiterials  met  after  their  long  prepai-ation 
and  the  flash  came.  After  that  the  fire  spread  rapidly. 
The  events  came  thick  and  fast.  In  1518  came  the  Diet 
of  Augsburg,  where  he  met  the  Cardinal  Legate  Cajetan 
and  ended  his  discussion  by  an  appeal  ''  from  the  pope  ill- 
informed  to  the  pope  to  be  better  informed."  The  next 
year  came  the  great  debate  with  Eck  at  Leipzig,  where 
Luther  finally  denied  the  superiority  of  the  Roman  Church 
and  became  indeed  the  leader  of  the  German  nation 
against  Italian  domination.  Upon  this  followed  his  two 
pamphlets,  his  '' Address  to  the  Christian  Nobility  of  the 
German  Nation  "  and  his  "  Babylonian  Captivity  of  the 
Church,"  which  rang  like  trumpet-blasts  through  Germany 
and  Christendom.  The  next  year  he  was  excommunicated 
by  the  pope,  and  solemnly  burned  what  he  called  "the 


388  ESSAYS  AND   A  DDE  ESSES. 

execrable  bull  of  Antiebrist "  outside  the  gate  of  Witten- 
berg, lu  1521  be  stood  alone  Avitb  tbe  truth  and  God 
upon  his  side  before  the  Imperial  Triliunal  at  Worms. 
Then  came  his  friendly  imprisonment  at  the  Wartburg, 
where  he  translated  the  Ncav  Testament  in  that  sacred 
room,  as  if  here,  "  with  mere  heaven  and  the  silent  Thu- 
ringian  hills  looking  on,"  so  Carlyle  says,  "  a  grand  and 
grandest  battle  of  one  man  versus  the  devil  and  all  men 
was  fought,  and  the  latest  prophecy  of  the  eternal  was 
made  to  these  sad  ages  that  yet  rnn."  Thence  he  escaped, 
summoned  by  a  cry  of  his  people,  which  he  could  not  re- 
sist, in  the  fierce  peasant  insurrections ;  and  by  and  by, 
in  a  lull  of  that  wild  struggle,  he  married.  The  emanci- 
pated monk  married  the  emancipated  niin,  and  the  happy 
and  busy  family  life,  teeming  with  work,  ringing  with 
song  and  laugh  and  children,  began  in  the  old  grim  clois- 
ter rooms  at  Wittenberg.  These  eight  years  from  1517 
to  1525  make  the  center  and  the  power  of  the  great  Re- 
former's life.  As  we  turn  the  leaf  upon  which  they  are 
written  we  turn  from  medieval  into  modern  history.  Be- 
fore them  all  is  fantastical  and  strange,  full  of  half-lights 
not  easy  for  us  to  understand  or  follow.  After  them  all 
is  full  of  motive  and  meaning  which  we  can  comprehend. 
Indeed,  there  are  two  truly  cardinal  men :  Martin  Luther 
in  this  century  in  Germany,  and  Oliver  CromweU.  in  the 
next  century  in  England,  on  whom  more  than  on  any 
others  the  great  gates  seem  to  turn  and  open  which  let 
the  race  through  from  the  Old  World  into  the  New.  And 
to  the  great  scenes  of  history  are  added  in  this  central 
period  of  Luther's  life  these  three :  the  field  close  to  the 
gate  of  Wittenberg  where  he  burned  the  Inill ;  the  bishop's 
palace  at  Worms  where  he  faced  the  Diet ;  and  the  room 
at  the  Wartburg  where  he  translated  the  New  Testament 
and  whence  he  escaped  out  of  the  keeping  of  his  too  can- 


MARTIN  LUTHER.  389 

tious  friends  with  his  life  in  his  hands  to  go  and  save  his 
perplexed  and  suffering  people. 

A  long  and  busy  twenty-one  years  remained  before  the 
end  came,  and  he  died  in  1546,  at  the  same  Eisleben  where 
sixty-three  years  before  he  had  been  born.  They  were 
years  full  of  work  and  struggle,  years  also  full  of  prayer 
and  faith.  It  is  not  necessary  to  trace  them  in  detail. 
There  are  some  things  about  them  not  wholly  pleasant  to 
trace.  More  and  more  the  growing  Reformation  mixed 
itself  up  with  politics  and  statecraft — and  for  the  political 
side  of  reformation  Luther  cared  but  little.  The  discus- 
sion about  the  Lord's  Supper  with  the  light-loving  Swiss 
Reformer  Zwingle  came,  and  Luther  never  showed  so 
badly  as  in  that  debate  in  the  picturesque  old  castle  at 
Marburg.  He  was  overbearing  there.  He  clung  in  the 
letter.  He  would  not  pass  into  the  Spirit.  And  he  was 
not  thorouglily  true.  The  moralist  and  mystic  was  not 
wholly  ready  for  the  hour.  Indeed,  in  all  these  years 
there  is  a  lurking  sense  of  reaction  and  timidity.  He  is 
not  all  the  man  he  was.  And  yet  they  were  rich  years. 
The  people  were  upon  his  soul,  and  his  soul  was  very 
near  to  God.  "  Tlie  Warning  of  Dr.  Martin  Luther  to 
his  dear  Germans,"  so  reads  the  title-page  of  one  of  the 
hundred  pamphlets  which  came  pouring  from  his  press 
at  Wittenberg.  It  was  the  title-page  of  this  last  volume 
of  his  life.  The  mountain  which  had  stood  so  long,  rich 
with  deep  verdure,  catching  the  sunshine,  bearing  the  fii'st 
brunt  of  the  storms,  casting  abroad  its  bounteous  shade, 
sending  refreshing  waters  down  on  all  its  sides  into  the 
valleys,  sometimes  also  volcanic  and  fiery,  grew  perhaps 
calmer,  colder,  more  unworldly  as  the  snows  of  winter 
gathered  on  its  head ;  but  it  was  the  crown  of  the  great 
landscape  still ;  it  gave  dignity'  to  all  the  life  about  it ;  it 
caught  the  sunshine  and  bore  witness  of  the  heavens  to 


390  ESSAYS  AND  ADDE ESSES. 

the  end.  On  a  journey  of  peacemaking  and  of  friend- 
ship, Luther  was  taken  very  ill,  and  died  on  the  18th  of 
February,  1546.  Almost  his  last  words  before  he  passed 
into  the  perfect  presence  of  the  God  whom  he  had  loved 
and  served  so  long  were  words  of  faith  and  hope,  the 
words  of  his  Master,  the  words  of  the  Cross :  "  Father,  into 
Thy  hands  I  commend  my  spirit." 

The  man  who  dies  with  those  words  on  his  lips  and  in 
his  heart  goes  forth  to  do  the  work  of  God  in  the  immortal 
life,  goes  also  forth  in  influence  upon  the  earth  among  the 
coming  generations  of  mankind.  So  Luther  went  when 
the  long  weary  work  was  over  and  he  lay  at  last  calm  and 
dead  at  Eisleben.  What  shall  we  say  of  that  great  march- 
ing of  his  soul,  that  power  of  his  influence  which  has  had 
so  much  to  do  with  the  making  of  the  modern  world? 
He  was  the  great  Reformer.  Is  then  the  world  reformed  ? 
He  W' as  the  great  Protestant.  Is  then  his  Protestantism 
a  failure  or  a  success  ?  The  answer  to  that  cpiestion  must 
depend  upon  what  we  mean  by  Protestantism  and  what  is 
the  standard  b}^  which  we  judge  success.  If  we  are  fool- 
ish enough  to  think  of  Protestantism  as  a  power  which 
tried  to  take  the  place  of  Rome  and  govern  manldnd  after 
the  same  false  fashion  in  which  that  spiritual  tyrant  had 
aspired  to  bo  the  mistress  of  the  world ;  if  we  let  ourselves 
think  that  Pi'otestantism  is  a  fixed  set  of  doctrines  claim- 
ing infallibility  and  refusing  all  prospect  of  development, 
and  that  for  Protestantism  to  succeed  is  for  her  to  bring 
and  hold  all  men  together  in  loyalty  to  lengthy  creeds  and 
in  submission  to  a  central  ecclesiastical  authority — then 
certainly  Protestantism  has  failed,  as  it  ought  to  have 
failed.  But  we  have  not  so  read  the  hope  which  Luther 
spread  as  with  the  very  finger  of  the  morning  opening 
the  skies  for  a  new  day,  before  the  world.  Surely  the 
Protestantism  has  not  failed  which  for  four  centuries  at 
least  has  held  the  tja-anny  of  Rome  in  check  and  filled 


MARTIN  LUTHER,  39] 

the  earth  with  such  a  live  intelligence  and  so  much  of  the 
spirit  of  freedom  that  even  if  Rome  should  again  become 
the  mistress  of  the  world  she  could  not  be  the  blind  and 
brutal  Rome  of  which  Leo  boasted  and  with  which  Luther 
fought. 

But  there  is  more  to  say  than  that.  These  centuries  of 
Anglo-Saxon  life  made  by  the  ideas  of  Luther  answer  the 
question.  The  Protestantism  of  Milton  and  of  Goethe,  of 
Howard  and  of  Francke,  of  Newton  and  of  Leibnitz,  of 
Bunyan  and  of  Butler,  of  Wordsworth  and  of  Tennyson, 
of  Wesley  and  of  Channing,  of  Schleiermacher  and  of 
Maurice,  of  Washington  and  of  Lincoln,  is  no  failure.  We 
may  well  dismiss  the  foolish  question  and  with  new  pride 
and  resolve  brighten  afresh  the  great  name  of  Protestant 
upon  our  foreheads. 

Have  we  not  seen  to-day  something  of  what  Protestant- 
ism really  is — the  Protestantism  which  cannot  fail  ?  Full 
of  the  sense  of  duty  and  the  spirit  of  holiness  there  stands 
Luther — moralist  and  mystic.  Conscience  and  faith  are 
not  in  conflict  but  in  lofty  unison  in  him.  Through  him, 
because  he  was  that,  God's  waiting  light  and  power  stream 
into  the  world  and  the  old  hes  wither  and  humanity 
springs  uj)oii  its  feet.  Ah,  there  is  no  failure  there ! 
There  cannot  be.  The  time  will  come — perhaps  the  time 
has  come — when  a  new  Luther  will  be  needed  for  the  next 
great  step  that  humanity  must  take,  but  that  next  step  is 
possible  mainly  because  of  what  the  Monk  of  Wittenberg 
was  and  did  four  hundred  years  ago.  There  is  no  failiu-e 
there.  Only  one  strain  in  the  music  of  the  eternal  success 
— fading  away  but  to  give  space  for  a  new  and  higher 
strain. 

It  may  be  that  another  Luther  is  not  hkely.  It  may  be 
that  the  freer  atmosphere  in  which  the  world  is  hence- 
forth to  live  ^\dll  give  no  chance  for  such  explosions  as  in 
the  sixteenth  century  burst  open  the  tight  walls  of  papal 


392  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

power.  Perhaps  not  by  the  apparition  of  one  great  leader, 
but  by  the  steady  upward  movement  of  the  insjjired  whole, 
the  future  great  advances  of  humanity  are  to  be  made. 
No  man  can  say ;  but  this  at  least  is  sure,  that  the  great 
principles  of  Martin  Luther's  life  must  be  the  principles 
of  every  advance  of  man  on  to  the  very  end.  Always  it 
must  be  by  a  regeneration  of  humanity.  Always  it  must 
be  by  the  power  of  God  filling  the  soul  of  man.  Always 
it  must  be  religious.  Always  it  must  be  God  summoning 
man,  man  reaching  after  God.  Always  it  must  be  the 
moralist  and  the  mystic,  conscience  and  faith  meeting  in 
the  single  human  hero  or  in  humanity  at  large,  which 
makes  the  reformation.  And  however  it  shall  come,  all 
human  progress  must  remember  Martin  Luther. 

Every  reforination  until  man  comes  to  his  perfection 
will  be  easier  and  surer  because  of  this  great  Reformer 
whom  we  have  been  honoring,  for  whom  we  have  been 
thanking  God,  to-day.  Every  return  of  man,  rebellious 
against  sin  or  worldliness  or  false  authority,  into  a  more 
simple  and  devout  obedience  to  the  God  to  whom  he  be- 
longs, will  remember  with  gratitude  and  find  strength  in 
remembering  brave  Martin  Luther.  The  echo  of  the 
shouts  which  rang  at  Wittenberg  while  the  poj)e's  bull 
was  burning,  the  echo  of  the  trumpets  which  the  watch- 
man on  the  tower  blew  when  Luther  entered  into  Worms, 
will  be  heard,  if  men  listen  for  them,  in  the  farthest  and 
latest  of  the  ever-repeated  chimes  which,  until  the  Light 
and  the  Lord  have  perfectly  possessed  the  earth,  shall 
again  and  again 

"  Eiug  out  the  darkness  of  the  world, 
Eiuor  in  the  Christ  that  is  to  be." 


THE   BOSTON   LATIN   SCHOOL. 

(April  23,  1S85.) 

Mr.  President,  and  Brethren  of  the  Latin  School 
Association  :  A  great  public  school  wliich  has  lived  to 
celebrate  its  two  huudred  and  fiftieth  anuiversary  must 
sm'ely  have  a  story  of  wliich  it  need  not  be  ashamed.  It 
may  well  fling  wide  its  doors  and  invite  the  congratula- 
tions of  the  world,  for  it  has  entered  for  an  appreciable 
period  into  the  world's  history.  Its  arc  on  the  great  circle 
is  long  enough  for  the  eye  to  see.  It  evidently  has  pos- 
sessed a  true  vitality,  and  had  to  do  with  perpetual  prin- 
ciples and  the  continual  necessities  of  man.  For,  lo !  it 
has  hved  through  the  changing  seasons. 

It  evidently  was  no  creature  of  the  air.  It  must  have 
had  its  roots  in  the  unchanging  ground.  It  stands  before 
us  in  that  pecuhar  richness  of  old  age  which  belongs  alike 
to  old  trees  and  old  schools,  forever  fresh  with  the  new 
leaves  of  each  new  spring,  growing  stronger  as  they  grow 
older,  with  ever  sturdier  grasp  upon  the  soil.  There  is 
nothing  which  the  world  has  to  show  which  is  two  hun- 
dred and  fifty  years  old  that  more  deserves  the  thankful 
congratidations  of  its  friends  and  children  than  an  old 
school,  all  the  more  strong  and  alive  for  its  venerable  age. 

A  quarter  of  a  millennium  !  Let  us  think  for  a  moment 
how  long  a  period  of  time  that  is.  It  is  time  enough  for 
the  world  to  turn  a  new  face  to  her  sister-stars.  It  is  a 
time  long  enough  for  a  new  order  of  government,  a  new 
religion,  a  new  kind  of  man,  to  appear  and  to  become 

393 


394  ESSAYS  AXD  JDDEESSES. 

familiar  ou  oiir  planet.  It  is  a  time  long  enough  for  a 
new  continent  to  be  discovered  and  settled,  and  for  men 
almost  to  forget  that  there  ever  Avas  a  time  when  its  shores 
were  unknown.  It  is  two  hundred  and  fifty  years  from 
the  crowning  of  Charlemagne  to  the  battle  of  Hastings, 
from  William  the  Conqueror  to  the  Black  Prince,  from 
Robert  Bruce  to  Queen  Elizabeth,  from  Oliver  Cromwell 
to  General  Grant.  It  is  a  quarter  of  a  millennium  from 
Chaucer  to  Milton,  or  from  Shakesj)eare  to  Tennyson.  Is 
it  not  manifest  how  the  world  may  change  in  such  a  period 
as  separates  the  reign  of  Master  Pormort  from  the  reign 
of  Master  Merrill  in  ovir  Boston  Latin  School  ? 

When  an  institution  has  covered  so  long  a  period  of 
time  with  its  continuous  life,  it  becomes  a  bond  to  hold 
the  centuries  together.  It  makes  most  picturesquely  evi- 
dent the  unit}^  of  human  life  which  underlies  all  the  variety 
of  human  living.  One  of  the  values  of  this  anniversary 
occasion  hes  in  this,  that  in  the  unbroken  life  of  ovir  great 
mother  the  lives  of  all  her  childi'en  claim  brotherhood 
with  one  another.  You  and  I  are  feUow-students  and 
schoolmates  with  the  little  Indians  who  came  in  our  wil- 
derness to  claim  their  privilege  of  free  tuition,  when  Bos- 
ton hardly  reached  as  far  as  Winter  Street, 

The  little  Puritan  of  the  seventeenth  century  and  the 
little  Rationalist  of  the  nineteenth  look  each  other  in  the 
face,  and  understand  each  other  better  because  they  are 
both  pupils  of  the  Latin  School.  Nay,  I  am  not  sure  but 
even  more  than  that  is  true.  Who  can  say  that  in  the 
school's  unity  of  life  the  boys  of  the  centuries  to  be,  the 
boys  who  will  learn  strange  lessons,  play  strange  games, 
and  ask  strange  questions  in  the  Latin  School  in  1985, 
are  not  in  some  subtle  way  present  already  as  compauions 
and  as  influences  to  the  boys  who  are  to-day  standing  on 
the  narrow  line  of  the  present,  between  the  great  expanses 
of  the  past  and  future  ? 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  393 

It  is  safer,  and  so  it  is  wiser,  that  ou  this  anniversary 
evening  we  should  deal  more  with  the  past  than  with  the 
futiu'e,  and  be  more  historians  than  prophets ;  yet  never 
forgetting  that  no  man  ever  deals  truly  with  the  past, 
when  he  tiu-iis  his  facie  that  way,  who  does  not  feel  the 
future  coming  into  life  behind  his  back.  Let  us  remem- 
ber, then,  that  the  history  of  our  school  covers  the  most 
of  three  centuries,  and  that  it  began  to  be  just  at  the  time 
when  what  we  may  most  truly  call  the  modern  life  of  our 
English  race  had  at  last,  after  many  struggles,  become 
thoroughly  established. 

It  is  good  to  be  born  at  sunrise.  It  is  good  for  a  man 
or  an  institution  to  date  its  life  from  the  days  when  an 
order  of  things  which  is  to  exist  for  a  long  time  in  the 
world  is  in  the  freshness  of  its  j'outh.  Such  a  time  was 
the  first  half  of  the  seventeenth  century.  Then  were  be- 
ing sown  the  seeds  whose  harvests  have  not  yet  all  been 
reaped.  The  eighteenth  century  which  followed,  and  the 
nineteenth  century  in  which  we  live,  were  both  infolded 
in  that  gi-eat  germinal  century  of  English  life.  As  I  have 
read  the  history  of  oiu*  school,  it  has  appeared  to  me  that 
there  was  a  true  correspondence  between  the  periods  of 
its  career  and  the  three  centuries  through  which  its  life 
has  stretched.  One  evidence  of  what  a  vital  institution  it 
has  been,  of  how  it  has  responded  to  the  changing  life 
around  it,  of  how  it  has  had  its  changing,  ever  appropriate 
ministry  to  render  to  that  changing  life,  has  seemed  to 
me  to  lie  in  this :  that  its  history  di\ddes  itself  into  three 
great  periods,  marked  by  three  of  its  most  illustrious 
teacherships,  and  corresponding  in  a  striking  way  to  the 
three  centuries,  the  seventeenth,  the  eighteenth,  and  the 
nineteenth.  It  is  in  the  light  of  that  correspondence, 
which  I  am  sure  you  will  see  is  no  idle  fancy  of  my  own, 
that  I  shall  ask  you  to  consider  the  history  of  our  vener- 
able school  to-night.     Happil}',  her  annals  have  been  so 


396  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

faithfully  gathered  by  a  few  of  her  devoted  sons,  and  so 
fully  displayed  in  the  historical  account  which  has  been 
or  will  sliortly  be  spread  before  all  her  children,  that  I 
am  not  called  upon  to  write  her  history.  I  need  only  try, 
availing  myself  freely  of  the  results  of  theii'  indefatigable 
labors,  to  show  w^ith  what  broad  and  simple  readiness  she 
has  caught  the  spirit  of  each  passing  time,  and  done  her 
duty  by  them  all. 

The  institution  which  grows  naturally  in  its  own  atmo- 
sphere and  soil  grows  unobserved.  It  is  the  flindu  jug- 
gler's artificial  mango-tree  whose  growth  you  watch,  see- 
ing each  leaf  put  forth.  The  health}^  rose-tree  no  man 
sees  as  it  opens  its  healthy  buds  to  flowers.  Only  you 
look  out  some  morning,  and  there  it  is.  So  it  is  with  the 
Latin  School.  It  was  a  natural  and  necessary  fruit  of  the 
first  life  of  New  England ;  and  that  very  fact  makes  its 
beginning  misty  and  obscure.  The  colony  under  Win- 
throp  arrived  iu  the  Arabella,  and  founded  Boston  in  1630. 
On  the  4th  of  September,  1633,  the  Griffin  brought  John 
Cotton  fi"om  Lincolnshire  to  Boston,  full  of  pious  spirit 
and  wise  plans  for  the  new  colony  with  which  he  had  cast 
in  his  lot.  It  has  been  suggested  that  possibly  we  owe  to 
John  C'Otton  the  first  suggestion  of  the  first  town  school. 
Certainly  we  owe  some  other  of  the  early  things  of  the 
town  to  him.  He  brought  the  Thursday  Lecture  and  the 
Market-Day  in  the  Griffin  with  him.  And  it  is  evident 
that  iu  his  old  city  on  the  Witham  he  had  been  actually 
interested  in  the  growth  of  a  school  which,  in  some  of  its 
features,  was  not  unlike  the  one  which  in  the  second  year 
after  his  arrival  was  set  up  in  the  new  Boston.  However 
this  may  be,  here  is  the  town  record  of  the  13th  of  the 
second  month,  1635.  It  is  forever  memorable,  for  it  is 
the  first  chapter  of  our  Book  of  Genesis,  the  ver}^  cradle 
of  all  our  race :  "At  a  general  meeting  upon  publique 
notice  ...  it  was  then  generally  agreed  upon  that  our 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  397 

brother  Philemon  Porniort  shall  be  intreated  to  become 
scholemaster,  fur  the  teaching  and  nonvtering  of  children 
among'  us."  It  was  two  hundred  and  fifty  yccxrs  ago  to- 
day, just  nineteen  years  after  the  day  when  William  Shake- 
speare died,  just  seventy-one  years  after  the  day  when  he 
was  born. 

How  simple  that  short  record  is,  and  how  unconscious 
that  short  view  is  of  the  futiu-e  which  is  wrapped  up  in 
it !  Fifty-nine  thousand  children  who  crowd  Boston  pub- 
lic schools  to-day — and  who  can  count  what  thousands 
yet  unborn  f — are  to  be  heard  ciying  out  for  life  in  the 
dry,  quaint  words  of  that  old  vote.  By  it  the  first  educa- 
tional institution,  which  was  to  have  continuous  existence 
in  America,  and  in  it  the  public-school  sj^stem  of  the  land, 
came  into  being. 

Philemon  Pormort,  the  first  teaclier  of  the  Latin  School, 
is  hardly  more  than  a  mere  shadow  of  a  name.  It  is  not 
even  clear  that  he  ever  actually  taught  the  school  at  all. 
A  few  years  later,  with  Mr.  Wheelwright,  after  the  Hutch- 
inson excitement,  he  disappears  into  the  northern  woods, 
and  is  one  of  the  founders  of  Exeter,  in  New  Hampshire. 
There  are  rumors  that  he  came  back  to  Boston  and  died 
here,  but  it  is  all  very  uncertain.  One  would  say  that  it 
was  better  so.  This  was  no  one  man's  school.  It  was  the 
school  of  the  people,  the  school  of  the  town.  Dim,  half- 
discerned  Philemon  Pormort,  wdth  the  very  spelling  of  his 
name  disputed,  with  his  face  looking  out  u])on  us  from 
the  mist,  or  rather  with  the  mist  shaping  itself  for  a  mo- 
ment into  a  face  which  we  may  call  his,  merely  serves  to 
give  a  sort  of  human  reality  to  that  which  would  otherwise 
be  wholly  vague. 

Around  the  shadowy  form  of  Philemon  Pormort  hovers 
the  hardly  less  mistj^  figure  of  Daniel  Maude,  sometimes 
blending  with  it  as  possible  assistant,  sometimes  sepa- 
rating from  it  as  rival  and  successor — "  a  good  man,  of  a 


398  ESSAYS  AND   ADDBESSES. 

serious  spirit,  and  of  a  peaceable  and  quiet  disposition." 
He,  too,  disappears  northward  after  a  wliile,  and  goes  to 
be  the  minister  in  Dover,  in  New  Hampshire.  In  his 
place  came  Mr.  Woodbridge,  of  whom  even  less  is  known 
than  of  his  predecessors,  and  after  him  Robert  Woodman- 
sey,  who  ruled  for  twenty  years,  from  1650  to  1670.  He, 
too,  has  faded  to  a  shadow,  leaving-  room  for  a  picture, 
only  the  least  trifle  clearer,  of  Benjamin  Thomson,  of  whom 
it  is  known  that  he  wrote  verses,  which  have  given  liim  a 
humble  place  among  our  earlier  New  England  poets.  They 
were  not  light  or  buoyant  rhjanes.  None  of  the  poems 
of  those  days  would  please  our  ear  to-day.  These  were 
no  gay  or  careless  song-birds,  whose  music  breaks  forth 
now  and  then  in  the  morning-  of  national  hfe.  Indeed, 
there  is  a  strange  lack  of  the  gaiet}'  of  sunrise  in  all  those 
earliest  New  England  days.  The  dawn  of  our  history 
was  not  fresh  and  dewy.  It  was  rather  like  the  breaking 
of  the  daylight  over  a  field  where  the  battle  which  passed 
with  the  sunset  of  yesterday  is  to  be  opened  again  with 
the  sunrise  of  to-day,  and  the  best  of  its  nmsic  is  rather 
like  the  hoarse  beating  of  drums  than  like  the  songs  of 
birds.  Pormort,  and  Maude,  and  Woodbridge,  and  Wood- 
mansey,  and  singing  Thomson — these  fill  with  theu'  ghostly 
shapes  the  vague,  chaotic,  almost  prehistoric  period  of  our 
school.  And  yet  under  these  men  the  school  got  itself 
weU  established  and  became  a  certain  fact.  It  was  not 
what  in  these  days  we  call  a  free  school.  The  great  idea 
of  education  offered  without  cost  to  all  the  town's  children 
at  the  town's  expense  had  not  j'et  taken  shape.  It  needed 
long  and  gradual  development.  The  name  "  free  school " 
in  those  days  seems  to  have  been  used  to  characterize  an 
institution  which  should  not  be  restricted  to  any  class  of 
children,  and  which  should  not  be  dependent  on  the  fluctu- 
ating attendance  of  scholars  for  its  support.  It  looked 
forward  to  ultimate  endowment,  like  the  schools  of  Eng- 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  399 

land.  The  town  set  apart  the  rent  of  Deer  Island,  and 
some  of  the  other  islands  in  the  hai'bor,  for  its  help.  All 
the  great  citizens,  Governor  Winthrop,  Governor  Vane, 
Mr.  BelHnghani,  and  the  rest,  made  generous  contribu- 
tions to  it.  But  it  called  also  for  support  from  those 
who  sent  their  children  to  it,  and  who  were  able  to  pay 
something ;  and  it  was  only  of  the  Indian  children  that 
it  was  distinctly  provided  that  they  should  be  "taught 
gratis." 

It  was  older  than  any  of  the  schools  which,  in  a  few 
years,  grew  up  thick  around  it.  The  same  power  which 
made  it  spring  out  of  the  soil  was  in  all  tlie  rich  ground 
on  which  these  colonists,  unlike  any  other  colonists  which 
the  world  has  ever  seen,  had  set  their  feet.  Roxbury  had 
its  school  under  the  Apostle  Eliot  in  1645.  Cambridge 
was  already  provided  before  1643.  Charlestown  did  not 
wait  later  than  1G3G.  Salem  and  Ipswich  were,  both  of 
them,  ready  in  1637.  Plymouth  did  not  begin  its  system 
of  public  instruction  till  1663.  It  was  in  1647  that  the 
General  Court  enacted  that  resolve  which  is  the  great 
charter  of  free  educatio]i  in  our  commonwealth,  in  whose 
preamble  and  ordinance  stand  the  immortal  words  :  "  That 
learning  may  not  be  buried  in  the  grave  of  our  fathers, 
in  Church  and  Commonwealth,  the  Lord  assisting  our  en- 
deavors, it  is  therefore  ordered  that  every  township  in  this 
jurisdiction,  after  the  Lord  hath  increased  them  to  the 
number  of  fifty  householders,  shall  then  forthwith  appoint 
one  within  their  town  to  teach  all  such  children  as  shall 
resort  to  him  to  ^viite  and  read." 

There  can  be  no  doubt,  then,  of  our  priorit3''.  But  mere 
priority  is  no  great  thing.  The  real  interest  of  the  begin- 
ning of  the  school  is  the  large  idea  and  scale  on  which  it 
started.  It  taught  the  children,  little  Indians  and  all,  to 
read  and  write.  But  there  seems  every  reason  to  suppose 
that  it  taught  also  the  Latin  tongue,  and  all  that  then  was 


400  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

deemed  the  higher  knowledge.  It  was  the  town's  only 
school  till  1682.  Side  by  side  on  its  hnmble  benches  sat 
the  son  of  the  governor  and  the  son  of  the  fisherman,  each 
to  take  the  best  that  he  could  grasp.  The  highest  learn- 
ing was  declared  at  once  to  be  no  privilege  of  an  aristo- 
cratic class,  but  the  portion  of  any  boy  in  town  who  had 
the  soul  to  desire  it  and  the  brain  to  appropriate  it.  So 
simply,  so  unconsciously,  there  w^s  set  up,  where  the 
School  Street  of  the  days  to  come  was  not  even  yet  a 
country  road,  this  institution,  whose  exact  like  the  world 
had  never  seen,  and  which  had  in  itself  the  germs  of  free 
commercial  rivalry  and  republican  government  and  uni- 
versal suffrage  and  all  the  wondrous  unborn  things. 

The  most  valuable,  perhaps,  of  all  things  which  this  new 
public  school  represented  was  that  which  we  may  well 
hold  to  constitute  the  greatest  claim  of  the  public-school 
system  in  all  time  to  our  affection  and  esteem.  It  repre- 
sented the  fundamental  idea  of  the  town  undertaking  the 
education  of  her  children.  It  is  in  the  loyalty,  the  grati- 
tude, the  educated  notion  of  obedience  to  the  town  which 
has  trained  them.  It  is  in  the  dignity  and  breadth  and 
seriousness  which  the  sense  that  their  town  is  training 
them  gives  to  their  training  that  the  advantage  of  the 
public-school  boys  over  the  boys  of  the  best  private  schools 
always  consists.  And  this  was  already  present  from  the 
day  that  the  doors  of  the  first  public  school  were  opened, 
two  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago.  The  boys  of  Pormort 
and  of  "Woodmansey  were  dimly  conscious  of  it,  and  it 
had  influence  on  them.  Who  was  it  that  had  built  their 
school-house  1  Who  was  it  that  had  laid  out  their  course 
of  study  and  arranged  their  hours "?  Who  was  it  that  set 
them  their  lessons  and  heard  their  recitations  ?  Whose 
were  the  sacred  hands  that  flogged  them  ?  Who  was  it 
that  sat,  a  shadowy  form,  but  their  real  ruler  and  friend, 
behind  the  master's   awful  chair?     It  was  their  town. 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  401 

That  is  the  real  heart  of  the  whole  matter.  That  is  the 
real  power  of  the  public-school  system  always.  It  edu- 
cates the  thought  of  law  and  obedience,  the  sense  of 
mingled  love  and  fear,  which  is  the  true  citizen's  true 
emotion  to  his  city.  It  educates  this  in  the  very  lessons 
of  the  school-room,  and  makes  the  person  of  the  state  the 
familiar  master  of  the  grateful  subject  from  his  boyhood. 
Such  has  been  the  power  of  our  Latin  School  for  two 
centuries  and  a  half. 

Thus,  then,  the  school  is  in  existence,  and  now  appears 
the  first  of  the  three  great  masters  of  whom  I  spoke  who 
have  given  it  its  cliaracter.  Now  its  history  comes  forth 
from  the  mist,  for  in  the  year  1670  Ezekiel  Cheever  be- 
comes its  master,  with  his  long  reign  of  thirty-eight  years 
before  him.  The  time  will  come,  perhaps,  when  some 
poetic  brain  will  figure  to  itself,  and  some  hands,  alert 
with  historical  imagination — perhaps  the  same  which  have 
bidden  John  Harvard  live  in  innnortal  youth  in  Cam- 
bridge— wiU  shape  out  of  vital  bronze  what  sort  of  man 
the  first  great  master,  Ezekiel  Cheever,  was.  It  will  be 
well  worth  doing,  and  it  will  not  be  hard  for  genius  to  do. 
Whoever  knows  the  seventeenth  century  will  see  start  into 
life  its  typical  man — the  man  of  prayer,  the  man  of  faith, 
tlie  man  of  duty,  the  man  of  God.  Already,  when  he 
came  to  teach  the  school  in  Boston,  the  wild  tumult  of 
the  Restoration  was  engulfing  social  life  in  England,  but 
it  had  not  readied  these  quiet  shores,  or  it  had  been  beaten 
back  from  against  our  solemn  rocks.  The  men  here  were 
Cromwell's  men,  and  none  was  more  thoroughly  a  man 
of  the  first  half  of  his  century  than  Ezekiel  Cheever.  He 
had  been  born  in  London,  in  1614,  and  had  come  first  to 
our  Boston  when  he  was  twenty-three  years  old.  He  did 
not  tarry  here  then,  but  went  on  to  New  Haven,  where  he 
taught  scholars,  among  whom  was  Michael  Wigglesworth, 
the  fearful  poet  of  "  The  Day  of  Doom."     Thence  he  came, 


402  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

hy  and  by,  to  Ipswich,  then  to  Charlestown,  and  he  was 
a  mature  Puritan  fifty-six  years  okl  before,  with  solemn 
ceremony,  he  received  from  the  great  men  of  the  town,  on 
the  sixth  day  of  November,  1670,  the  keys  of  the  school- 
liouse,  and  became  the  master  of  the  Latin  School.  He 
lived  in  the  school-house,  and  received  a  salary  of  sixty 
pounds  a  year.  For  this  he  evidently  felt  that  he  accepted 
grave  responsil)ility.  It  was  not  onl}^  to  teach  these  boys 
Latin.  Latin  was  merely  an  instrument  to  life.  And  so 
all  those  conceptions  and  those  rules  of  life  which  English 
Puritanism  had  beaten  out  perhaps  more  clearly  and  pre- 
cisely than  any  other  religious  system  which  ever  ruled 
the  thoughts  of  men — all  these  filled  and  were  blended 
with  the  classic  education  of  his  school.  He  prayed  with 
the  boys  one  by  one  when  he  had  heard  their  lessons. 
He  not  merely  educated  their  minds,  but  he  wrestled  for 
their  soids.  He  wrote  two  books,  his  famous  '^  Accidence," 
which  for  a  century  held  the  place  of  honor  among  Latin 
school-books,  and  his  "  Scripture  Prophecies  Explained," 
which  reverently  but  confidently  lifted  the  veil  from  the 
eternal  things.  Probably  the  second  book,  no  less — nay, 
much  more — than  the  first,  lay  near  his  heart.  He  was 
called — perhaps  some  of  my  modern  hearers  may  not  at- 
tach very  clear  notions  to  the  name,  but  we  are  sure  that 
he  would  have  treasured  it  among  his  choicest  titles — he 
was  called  by  Cotton  Mather  "  a  sober  chiliast."  The  next 
world  for  him  was  always  brooding  over  and  flowing 
through  this  world.  We  can  well  believe  that  it  was  the 
eternal  terror^  and  no  mere  earthly  ra,ge,  which  was  bm-n- 
ing  in  his  eye  when  his  scholar,  the  reverend  Mr.  Samuel 
Maxwell,  got  that  idea  of  him  which,  years  afterward,  he 
WTote  among  his  reminiscences.  It  is  the  only  scrap  of 
personal  portrait,  I  think,  which  is  left  of  Master  Cheever. 
Mr.  Maxwell  says :  ''  He  wore  a  long  white  beard,  termi- 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  403 

natinG:  in  a  point,  and  when  lie  stroked  liis  })eard  to  the 
point  it  was  a  sign  for  the  boys  to  stand  clear."  It  has 
often  come  to  pass  that  great  schoolmasters  have  found 
among  their  pupils  the  voice  or  pen  which  has  saved  them 
from  oblivion — the  rates  sacer  who  has  rescued  them  from 
lying  unknown  in  long  night :  what  Stanley  did  for 
Dr.  Arnold  of  Kugby,  what  Ernest  Renan  has  done  for 
Bishop  Dupanloup  of  St.  Nicolas  du  Chardonnet,  that 
Cotton  Mather,  the  historian  and  poet-laureate  of  early 
Boston,  did  in  a  funeral  sermon  and  a  memorial  poem  for 
Ezekiel  Cheever.  The  nmse  was  never  more  modish  and 
self-conscious,  poetry  never  labored  under  such  mountain- 
weiglit  of  pedantry,  conceits  never  so  turned  and  returned 
and  doubled  ou  themselves,  the  flowers  of  rhetoric  never 
so  ran  to  seed,  as  in  the  marvelous  verses  in  which  the 
minister  of  the  North  Church  did  obituary  honor  to  the 
master  of  the  Latin  School.  And  yet  it  shows  how  great 
a  man  the  master  was  that  the  reality  of  his  pupil's  tribute 
to  his  greatness  pierces  through  all  his  absiu'd  exaggera- 
tion, and  he  walks  grandly  even  in  these  preposterous 
clothes.  Hear  him  one  instant  patiently,  just  to  see  what 
it  is  like : 

"  A  miglity  tribe  of  well-instructed  youth 
Tell  what  they  owe  to  him,  and  tell  with  truth ; 
All  the  eight  parts  of  speech  he  taught  to  them 
They  now  employ  to  trumpet  his  esteem ; 
They  fill  Fame's  Trumpet,  and  they  spread  his  Fame 
To  last  till  the  last  Trumpet  drown  the  same." 

Then  come  some  lines  which  give  us  an  idea  of  the  speci- 
men words  of  the  famous  "  Accidence  "  : 

"  Magister  pleased  them  well,  because  'twas  he ; 
They  saw  that  Bonus  did  with  it  agree  ; 
When  they  said  Amo  they  the  hint  improve, 
Him  for  to  make  the  object  of  their  love." 


404  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDUESSES. 

And  then  these  verses,  wliicli  link  his  name  with  that  of 
his  brother-teacher  in  Cambridge  : 

"  'Tis  Corlet's  pains  and  Clieever's  we  must  own 
Tliat  thou,  New  England,  art  not  Seythia  grown  ;* 
The  Isles  of  Scilly  liad  o'errun  this  day 
The  Continent  of  our  America." 

It  is  poor  verse,  not  to  be  made  mneh  of  in  this  pres- 
ence. But  there  is  a  certain  reality  about  it,  nevertheless. 
It  catches  something  of  the  stimibling  style,  half  grand, 
half  commonplace,  with  which  all  that  old  New  England 
greatness  used  to  walk.  It  has  the  same  patchwork  color- 
ing, yet  giving  on  the  whole  a  total  and  complete  impres- 
sion, which  we  behold  in  the  sentence  which  Judge  Sewall 
wrote  in  his  diary  on  the  twenty-first  day  of  August,  1708, 
when  he  heard  at  last  that  the  old  schoolmaster  was  dead 
at  the  good  age  of  ninety-four.  "  He  labored  in  his  call- 
ing," Sewall  says,  "  skilfully,  diligentl}^,  constantly,  relig- 
iously, seventy  years — a  rare  instance  of  piety,  health, 
strength,  serviceableness.  The  welfare  of  the  province 
was  much  upon  his  spirit.  He  abominated  periwigs." 
Can  we  not  see  the  good,  simple,  severe  old  man  ?  They 
buried  him  from  the  school-house,  with  the  familiar  desks 
and  benches  looking  on  at  the  service,  and  as  the  gram- 
marian's funeral  passed  out  over  the  Neck  to  Roxbnry 
Burial  Ground,  the  reign  of  the  first  great  master  of  the 
Latin  School  was  over ! 

No  doubt  it  all  was  very  grim.  The  master  was  grim, 
and  the  boys  were  grim.  And  a  grim  boy  is  the  grimmest 
thing  on  earth.  But  we  must  not  let  the  picture  of  the 
Puritan  school-house  grow  too  somber  in  our  thoughts. 
They  were  boys  still,  those  little  Puritans,  and  the  whole 
generation  of  sober  manners  and  repressed  feelings  can- 
not have  wholly  exorcised  the  spirit  of  mischief  which  has 
haunted  the  boy-nature  in  all  the  ages.     And  always,  in 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  405 

thinking  about  the  Puritan  times,  we  need  to  remember 
that  the  brightness  or  dulness  of  any  spot  in  a  picture  de- 
pends altogether  on  the  tone  or  key  in  which  tlie  picture, 
as  a  whole,  is  painted.  A  spot  of  dull  red  in  a  canvas 
which  is  all  ashen-gray  will  glow  and  burn  as  the  most 
brilliant  scarlet  fails  to  do  in  the  midst  of  a  great  carnival 
of  frantic  color.  It  is  a  question  of  backgrounds  and  pro- 
portions. And  so  a  very  little  frolic  must  have  gone  a 
great  way  in  the  Boston  of  Ezeldel  Cheever,  which  was 
the  Boston  of  the  "  Scarlet  Letter."  "VMiere  Cotton  Mather 
was  the  Homer  and  the  " Magnalia "  was  the  "Iliad,"  the 
power  of  being  amused  was  no  doubt  in  true  relation  to  the 
means  of  amusement  which  were  offered ;  and  it  may  weU 
be  doubted  whether,  save  in  some  exceptional  mortal  here 
and  there,  born  out  of  due  time,  too  early  or  too  late,  born 
with  a  humorous  and  freakish  spirit  which  had  embodied 
itself  in  the  wrong  place,  there  was  any  felt  lack  of  those 
brighter  elements,  tha,t  ozone  in  the  atmosphere  of  life, 
which  has  come  to  seem  to  us  so  absolutely  necessary. 
But  if  we  leave  the  question  of  amusement  on  one  side, 
and  think  more  serious  things,  then  the  school  shines  with 
an  uncjuestionable  light.  It  may  have  been  very  grim, 
but  that  it  was  pervaded  with  a  clear,  deep  sense  of  duty, 
that  it  was  a  place  where  life  was  seriously  thought  of, 
and  where  hard  work  was  done,  no  student  of  those  days 
can  doubt.  Not  yet  had  come  the  slightest  hesitation 
concerning  the  directioii  which  education  ought  to  take. 
They  gave  themselves  to  the  classics  without  any  mocking 
voice  to  tell  them  that  their  devotion  was  a  fetish- worship. 
Indeed,  any  one  who  thoroughly  believes  that  the  classical 
study  is  to-day  a  homage  to  an  effete  idol  may  still  be  free 
to  own  that  in  the  days  of  Cheever  it  was  a  true  service 
of  a  stiU  living  master.  The  Renaissance  and  the  Eefor- 
mation,  both  full  of  the  spirit  of  classicism,  were  hardly 
two  centuries  old.     Latin  was  still  the  living  language 


406  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDRESSES. 

of  diplomacy.  John  Milton,  once  the  Latin  secretary  of 
Cromwell,  possibly  himself  a  teacher  of  Ezekiel  Cheever 
in  his  youth,  did  not  die  till  the  great  Boston  master  had 
been  teacliing  here  four  years.  And  the  New  Testament, 
being  the  book  which  lay  at  the  very  soul  of  all  New  Eng- 
land, kept  the  Greek  tongue  vital  and  sacred  in  every  true 
New  England  heart  and  household.  To  forget  that  days 
have  changed  since  then  is  folly.  To  shut  our  eyes  to  the 
great  procession  of  new  sciences  which  have  come  troop- 
ing in,  demanding  the  recogidtion  and  study  of  educated 
men,  is  to  be  blind  to  a  great  series  of  events  which  the 
world  sees  and  in  which  it  glories.  The  classics  are  not, 
cannot  be,  what  they  were  when  Ezekiel  Cheever  taught 
Cotton  Mather  and  President  Leverett  their  Latin  gram- 
mar. They  are  not  and  they  cannot  be  again  the  tools  of 
present  life,  the  instruments  of  current  thought.  All  the 
more  for  that  they  may  be  something  greater,  something 
better.  All  the  more  they  may  stand  to  those  whose  priv- 
ilege it  is  to  study  them  as  the  monumental  structures 
which  display  the  power  of  perfected  human  speech.  All 
the  more  they  may  shine  in  their  finished  beauty  in  the 
midst  of  our  glorious,  tumultuous  modern  life  as  the  Greek 
temples  stand  in  the  same  Em-ope  which  holds  the  Gothic 
cathedrals,  offering  forever  the  rest  of  their  completeness 
for  the  comfort  of  men's  eagerness  and  discontent.  All 
the  more  they  may  show  enshrined  within  them  the  large 
and  simple  types  of  human  life  and  character,  the  men 
and  women  who  shine  on  our  perplexed,  distracted,  modern 
life,  as  the  calm  moon  shines  upon  the  vexed  and  broken 
waters  of  the  sea.  So  long  as  they  can  do  these  offices 
for  man,  the  classics  will  not  pass  out  of  men's  stud}'.  It 
is  good  to  make  them  elective,  but  we  may  be  sure  that 
students  will  elect  them  abundantly  in  school  and  college. 
It  was  the  classic  culture  in  those  earliest  days  that 
bound  the  Latin  School  and  Harvard  College  close  to- 


THE  BOSTON  LATIX  SCHOOL.  407 

getlier.  The  college  is  young-  beside  our  venerable  seliool. 
It  did  not  come  to  bii'tli  till  we  were  four  years  old.  But 
when  the  college  had  been  founded,  it  and  the  school  be- 
came, and  ever  since  have  made,  one  system  of  continu- 
ous education.  Boys  learned  their  "Accidence  "  in  School 
Street,  and  went  and  were  examined  in  it  at  Cambridge. 
The  compilers  of  our  catalogue  have  thought  it  right  to  as- 
sume that  every  Boston  graduate  of  Harvard  in  those  ear- 
liest years  had  studied  at  the  Latin  School.  Such  union 
between  school  and  college  has  continued  year  after  year, 
and  has  been  a  great  and  helpful  influence  for  both.  It 
has  kept  the  school  alwaj^s  alert  and  ready  for  the  highest 
standards.  In  the  days  of  the  first  great  master  Cotton 
Mather  wrote :  "  It  was  noted  that  when  scholars  came 
to  be  admitted  into  the  college  they  who  came  from  the 
Cheeverian  education  were  generally  the  most  unexcep- 
tionable." We  Latin  School  boys  have  loved  to  think  that 
that  has  never  ceased  to  be  the  case.  And  so  the  college 
has  always  helped  the  school.  But  the  school  also  has 
helped  the  college.  Its  response  to  all  the  new. methods 
which  have  risen  in  the  university  has  ever  been  cordial 
and  sincere.  Its  thoroughness  of  work  has  helped  to  make 
those  methods  possible.  The  men  in  whose  minds  those 
methods  have  arisen  have  been  often  men  of  our  school. 
From  Leverett  to  Eliot  the  school  has  given  to  the  college 
not  a  few  of  its  best  presidents  and  professors.  And  so 
we  have  a  right  to  feel  that  we  have  not  merely  been 
dragged  in  the  wake  of  our  great  neighbor,  but  have  had 
something  to  do  with  the  shaping  of  her  course.  Ships 
which  met  the  Alaska  and  the  Winni2)eg  upon  mid-ocean 
thought  that  they  saw  only  a  great  steamer  with  a  little 
one  in  tow ;  l^ut  really  the  little  steamer  was  the  rudder 
that  was  keeping  the  great  steamer  in  her  course. 

And  so  we  part  with  INIaster  Cheever,  the  great  seven- 
teenth-century schoolmaster,  and  pass  on.     Almost  the 


408  ESSAYS  JXD   JDDIiESSES. 

last  glimpse  wliicli  we  catcli  of  him  iu  the  school-room, 
when  he  is  more  than  eighty  years  old,  has  something 
noble  in  its  simplicity.  A  boy  is  angrily  rebuked  by  him 
for  a  false  syntax.  He  ventures  to  dispute  the  master's 
judgment.  He  shows  a  rule  which  had  escaped  the  mas- 
ter's memory,  and  proves  that  he  is  right.  The  master 
smiles  and  says :  "  Thou  art  a  brave  boy.  I  had  forgot 
it."  That  is  the  very  heroism  of  school-teaching.  So  let 
his  serious  face  pass  smiling  out  of  our  sight. 

With  Cheever's  death  the  school  passed  into  the  reign 
of  Nathaniel  Williams.  He  is  already  a  different  kind  of 
man.  It  is  said  of  him  that  he  was  "  agreeable,"  which 
nobody  had  said  of  Cheever.  He  has  accomplishments. 
And  in  him  there  are  signs  of  versatility  which  belong 
more  to  the  new  century  than  to  the  old;  for  he  was  min- 
ister and  doctor  at  the  same  time  that  he  was  schoolmaster. 
It  is  wi-itten  that  "amid  the  multiplicity  of  his  duties 
as  instructor  and  physician  in  extensive  practice  he  never 
left  the  ministerial  work."  No  part  of  man's  threefold 
nature  was  left  out  of  his  care.  Well  might  he  have  wi'it- 
ten  as  the  motto  of  his  memorandum  book,  in  Avhich  per- 
haps he  kept  all  together  his  prescriptions  and  the  notes 
of  his  sermons  and  the  roster  of  his  school,  "  Hiunani  a 
me  nil  aJiennm  putoy  No  doubt  his  pupils  were  both  losers 
and  gainers  by  the  diffusion  of  theu*  master's  mind. 

In  those  pupils  also  we  begin  to  see  a  change.  It  is 
no  longer  Cotton  Mather,  but  Benjamin  Franklin,  who 
is  the  t}7)ical  Boston  boy.  At  eight  years  old,  his  father 
intending  to  devote  him,  according  to  his  own  account,  as 
the  tithe  of  his  sons  to  the  service  of  the  Church,  he  was 
put  to  the  grammar  school.  He  did  not  sta}^  there  long, 
for  he  did  not  accept  his  father's  consecration  of  his  life, 
but  soon  passed  out  to  the  printer's  shop  and  the  Conti- 
nental Congress  and  the  French  Court,  and  experiments 
upon  the  thunderous  skies.     But  he  and  Samuel  Adams, 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  409 

who  was  one  of  Master  Williams's  later  scholars,  let  us 
feel  how  the  times  have  changed  and  another  centmy 
begun. 

Yet  still  the  sober  religious  spirit  of  the  past  days  has 
not  vanished.  For  years  to  come  the  school  is  dismissed 
early  for  the  Thursday  Lecture.  In  1709  the  first  begin- 
ning of  what  now  is  the  school  committee  makes  its  ap- 
pearance. A  certain  number  of  gentlemen  of  liberal  edu- 
cation, together  with  some  of  the  reverend  ministers  of 
the  town,  are  asked  to  be  inspectors  of  the  school,  and 
at  their  visitation,  "  one  of  the  ministers  by  tm-ns  to  pray 
with  the  scholars,  and  entertain  'em  with  some  instruc- 
tions of  piety  specially  adapted  to  their  age  and  educa- 
tion." According  to  its  light  the  town  still  counted  that 
it  was  its  responsibility  and  right  to  watch  over  its  chil- 
dren's characters.  And  the  child  honored  religion  all  the 
more  because  he  had  heard  his  mother-city  praying,  his 
Jerusalem  crying  out  to  God  for  him. 

But  I  suppose  the  most  striking  thing  which  came  in 
the  teachership  of  Williams  must  have  been  the  distur- 
bance in  town  meeting  in  the  year  1711.  Some  innova- 
tors, restless  spirits  who  were  not  satisfied  to  leave  things 
as  they  were,  had  made  inquiries  and  found  that  in  the 
schools  of  Europe  boys  really  learned  Latin,  and  learned 
it  with  less  of  toil  and  misery  than  here.  And  so  they 
sent  a  memorial  to  the  town-house  which  recounted,  to 
use  its  curious  words,  that  ''  according  to  the  methods 
used  here  very  many  hundreds  of  boys  in  this  town,  who 
by  their  parents  were  never  designed  for  a  more  liberal 
education,  have  spent  two,  three,  and  four  years  or  more 
of  their  early  days  at  the  Latin  School,  which  hath  proved 
of  very  little  or  no  benefit  to  their  after  accomplishment,'' 
and  asked  ''  whether  it  might  not  be  advisable  that  some 
more  easie  and  delightful  methods  be  attended  and  put 
in  practice."     It  was  referred  to  committees  in  the  good 


410  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

old  way,  and  came  to  nothing  then ;  but  it  is  interesting, 
because  in  it  there  is  the  first  symptom  which  our  town 
has  to  show  of  tliat  rebellion  against  the  tyranny  and 
narrowness  and  unreasonableness  of  the  classical  system 
which  will  be  heard  as  long  as  the  classical  system  mani- 
fests its  perpetual  tendency  to  become  tyrannical  and  nar- 
row and  unreasonable.  "  Some  more  easie  and  delightful 
methods  !  "  How  the  souls  of  the  school-boys  have  hun- 
gered for  them  through  the  ages  all  along !  How  we,  the 
students  of  a  century  and  a  half  later,  looking  back  on 
our  own  school-boy  days,  feel  still  that  a  more  easy  and 
dehghtful  method  than  that  which  we  know  somewhere 
exists  and  must  some  day  be  found !  Were  we  not  started 
on  a  course  of  study  which,  if  one  of  Pormort's  bo3'^s  had 
begun  it  on  the  day  on  which  the  school  was  opened  and 
continued  it  till  now,  he  hardly  would  have  mastered  yet? 
Were  not  we  treated  as  if  the  object  of  our  study  were 
not  that  we  should  get  the  delight  out  of  Cicero  and  Vir- 
gil, but  as  if  every  one  of  us  were  meant  to  be  either  an- 
other Andi'cws  or  another  Stoddard  ?  Remembering  these 
things,  we  bless  the  memory  of  the  memorialists  of  1711 ; 
we  rejoice  to  think  that  the  classics,  finding  themselves 
hard  pressed  by  upstart  modern  sciences,  must  ultimately 
justify  and  keep  their  place  by  finding  out  more  "  easie 
and  delightful  methods." 

The  eighteenth  century,  then,  was  well  upon  its  way 
when,  almost  exactly  a  hundred  years  after  the  foundation 
of  the  school,  John  Lovell,  the  second  of  its  representative 
men,  became  its  master.  The  school  at  last  has  reached 
that  stage  of  growth  in  which  it  produces  its  own  seed 
and  renews  itself  from  its  own  stock.  John  Lovell  was 
the  first  true  Boston  boy,  bred  in  the  orthodox  routine 
of  Latin  School  and  Harvard  College,  who  attained  the 
mastership.  Since  him  only  one  master  has  ascended  to 
that  dignity  save  by  those  sacred  stairs.  It  has  kept  us 
very  local,  but  has  made  no  small  part  of  our  strength. 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  411 

John  Lovell's  name  shines  in  our  history  as  perhaps  the 
best  known  of  all  our  sovereigns.  His  portrait,  painted 
by  Sniibert,  whose  son  he  taught,  hangs  in  the  Memorial 
Hall  at  Cambridge,  and  its  copy  here  looks  down  oq  us 
to-night  as  it  has  gazed  on  many  of  the  fast-coming  and 
fast-going  generations  of  Latin  School  boys  here  and  in 
Bedford  Street.  Look  on  its  calm  complacency  and  say 
if  it  be  not  the  very  embodiment  of  the  first  three  quarters 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  before  the  great  distiu'bance 
and  explosion  came.  The  age  of  troublesome  questions 
and  of  wrestling  souls  has  passed  awa3^  The  time  of  rea- 
son has  succeeded  to  the  time  of  faith.  Authority  and 
obedience  are  the  dominant  ideas.  System  and  order  are 
the  worshiped  standards.  Satisfaction  with  things  as  they 
are  is  the  prevailing  temper.  A  long  and  somewhat  sultry 
calm  precedes  the  outburst,  as  yet  unfeared,  with  which 
the  century  is  to  close,  and  which  is  to  clear  the  ah*  for 
the  richer  days  in  which  it  has  been  our  privilege  to  live. 

John  Lovell  seems  to  have  been  thoroughly  a  man  of 
his  time.  It  is  said  of  him  that  "  though  a  severe  teacher, 
yet  he  was  remarkably  humorous  and  an  agreeable  com- 
panion." That  is  a  true  eighteenth-century  description. 
Insistence  on  authority  and  comfortable  good-humor  united 
in  the  seK-satisfied  conservatism,  the  marvelous  self-con- 
tentment, of  those  days.  The  great  achievement  of  the 
master  was  his  oration  on  the  death  of  Peter  Faneuil,  Esq., 
delivered  in  the  new  hall  which  the  benefactor  of  the 
town  had  built.  It  is  florid  and  was  considered  eloquent. 
*'  May  this  hall  be  ever  sacred  to  the  interests  of  truth,  of 
justice,  of  loyalty,  of  honor,  of  liberty.  May  no  private 
views  of  party  broils  ever  enter  these  waUs."  How  little 
he  who  so  consecrated  the  cradle  knew  of  the  tumultuous 
child  who  was  to  fill  it,  and  to  make  the  country  and  the 
world  ring  with  its  cries !  The  whole  oration  is  tumid 
and  profuse,  real  no  doubt  in  its  da}^,  but  beaiing  now 
an  inevitable  suspicion  of  unreality  and  superficialness. 


412  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDEESSES. 

Ezekiel  Cheever  could  not  have  written  it.  But  we  think 
that  Ezekiel  Cheever  would  not  have  written  it  if  he  could  ; 
he  would  have  had  stronger  things  to  say. 

I  have  not  thus  far  tried  to  trace  the  history  of  the  school- 
house  in  which  the  masters  of  whom  I  have  been  speaking 
taught,  because  the  negligent  records  have  allowed  it  al- 
most altogether  to  slip  through  their  careless  fingers ;  and 
there  are  hardly  more  than  modern  guesses  left.  The  soul 
was  sacred,  and  the  body  got  but  little  care.  We  only  know 
that  from  the  first  a  school-house,  which  w^as  also  the  head- 
master's dwelling,  stood  where  now  the  rear  of  the  King's 
Chapel  stands,  its  ground  reaching  about  to  where  the 
statue  of  its  former  pupil,  Benjamin  Franklin,  has  been 
set  up  in  bronze.  This  school-house  lasted  until  Lov- 
ell's  time.  It  is  of  it  in  his  time  that  it  is  said  that  the 
garden,  which  belonged  to  it,  was  cultivated  in  the  most 
thrifty  manner,  free  of  all  expense,  by  the  assistance  of 
the  best  boys  in  school,  who  were  permitted  to  work  in  it 
as  a  reward  of  merit.  The  same  best  boys  were  allowed 
to  saw  the  master's  wood  and  bottle  his  cider,  and  to  laugh 
as  much  as  they  pleased  while  performing  these  delightful 
offices.  Remember  that  these  "  best  boys  "  were  the  future 
signers  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  They  were 
John  Hancock  and  Robert  Treat  Paine  and  William 
Hooper,  James  Bowdoin  and  Harrison  Gray  Otis  were 
the  names  of  the  boys  who  made  the  garden  which  they 
tilled  ring  with  their  licensed  laughter.  The  hands  which 
sawed  the  master's  wood  were  the  same  hands  which 
dragged  their  sleds  to  General  Haldimand's  headquarters 
in  1775,  and  whose  owners  remonstrated,  with  the  vigor 
of  young  freemen,  against  the  desecration  of  their  coast 
by  the  insolent  British  soldiers.  The  spirit  of  loyalty  and 
the  spirit  of  liberty  together,  the  readiness  to  obey  legiti- 
mate authority  and  the  determination  not  to  submit  to 
tyranny,  these  two,  which  united  to  secure  and  which  have 


THE  BOSTON  LATIX  SCHOOL.  413 

united  to  sustain  our  institutions,  burned  together  in  the 
l)osoms  of  the  boys  who  went  to  the  old  school  on  the 
north  side  of  School  Street. 

In  1748  the  disturbance  of  that  school-house  came.  It 
made  a  wild  excitement  then  in  the  little  town,  but  the 
tumult  has  sunk  into  silent  oblivion  with  the  old  quarrels 
of  the  Athenian  Agora  and  the  Forum  of  Rome.  The 
King's  Chapel  was  prosperous,  and  wanted  to  enlarge  its 
house  of  worshii).  The  school-house  stood  right  in  the 
way.  Science  and  religion  were  in  conflict.  The  influ- 
ential chapel  asked  the  tow-n  for  leave  to  tear  the  school- 
house  down  and  build  another  on  land  which  the  chapel 
would  provide  across  the  street.  The  town's  people,  for 
some  reason,  perhaps  because  of  the  offensive  prelacy  of 
the  petitioners,  were  violent^  opposed  to  the  idea.  Master 
Lovell  himself  fought  hard  against  it.  Town-meeting 
after  town-meeting  of  the  most  excited  kind  was  held. 
The  strife  ran  high,  but  the  chapel  carried  the  day,  and 
in  a  town-meeting  of  April  18,  1748,  by  a  vote  of  205  to 
197,  the  prayer  of  the  petitioners  was  granted. 

The  onlj  epigram  to  which  our  school  ever  gave  occa- 
sion, the  only  flash  of  wit  which  lightens  the  sky  of  our 
serious  history,  comes  in  here,  and,  unique  as  it  is,  must 
not  be  omitted,  however  familiar  it  may  be,  in  any  memo- 
rial address.  I  charge  my  successor  of  two  hundred  and 
fifty  years  hence  to  find  for  it  a  place  in  his  semi-millen- 
nial oration.  On  the  morning  after  the  great  fight  was 
over  and  the  great  defeat  had  come,  Mr.  Joseph  Green,  the 
wearer  at  that  time  of  the  never-fading  laurel  of  the  wit 
of  Boston,  sent  into  the  school  to  Master  Lovell  these 
verses,  which  the  master  probably  read  out  to  the  boys : 

"  '  A  fig  for  your  learning  !  I  tell  yoii  the  town, 
To  make  the  clmreh  larger,  must  pnll  the  school  down.' 
'Unluckily  spoken,'  replied  Master  Birch, 
'Then  learning,  I  fear,  stops  the  growth  of  the  church.'" 


414  ESSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

The  school-house  which  the  King's  Chapel  built  in  ful- 
filment of  its  promise,  which  stood  where  the  eastern 
jDortion  of  the  Parker  House  now  stands,  seems  to  have 
vanished  mysteriously  and  completely  from  the  memory 
of  man.  It  stood  for  sixty  years,  and  to-day  no  record 
tells  us  what  was  its  look.  There  is  something  pathetic 
in  this  total  vanishing  of  an  old  house,  especially  of  an 
old  school-house.  It  was  so  terribly  familiar  once.  It  is 
so  hopelessly  lost  now.  We  might  as  well  try  to  recon- 
struct the  ship  of  Jason  or  the  horse  of  Troy.  A  hundred 
years  is  as  good  as  a  thousand  to  such  pure  oblivion.  The 
successor  of  that  first  school-house  on  the  south  side  of 
School  Street  was  the  building  in  which  }-ou,  sir,  and  many 
whom  the  city  stiU  delights  to  honor,  gained  their  edu- 
cation between  the  time  of  its  completion  in  18 12  and  its 
destruction  in  1844.  Nothing  remains  of  it  now  except 
its  key,  which  makes  part  of  our  modest  museum,  and 
which  I  here  hold  up  for  the  recognition  of  my  older 
friends.  After  that  came  the  Bedford  Street  house,  which 
many  of  us  who  still  feel  young  when  we  talk  with  the 
boy  who  went  to  school  in  School  Street  remember  with 
various  emotions,  and  which  gave  Avay  only  four  years  ago 
to  this  palatial  edifice,  which,  standing  in  our  imaginations 
alongside  of  the  little,  hardly  discoverable  shed  in  which 
Philemon  Pormort  taught,  is  the  real  orator  of  this  occa- 
sion. We  must  not  linger  too  long  with  Master  Lovell. 
It  was  in  the  mysterioiis  building  which  the  world  has 
now  forgotten  that  he  was  teaching  when  the  Revolution 
took  him  by  sui"prise.  He  was  not  equal  to  the  time,  and 
saw  no  further  into  the  future  than  allowed  him  to  lie  a 
Tory.  But  his  son  James,  whom  he  had  called  to  be  his 
assistant,  had  the  spirit  of  the  second  and  not  of  the  first 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  was  a  patriot.  Tra- 
dition tells  how  the  old  man  and  the  young  man  sat,  like 
the  embodied  spirits  of  the  past  and  the  future,  on  sepa- 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  415 

rate  platforms  at  the  two  ends  of  the  long- vanished  school- 
room, and  taught  the  rights  of  the  crown  and  the  rights 
of  the  people  to  the  boys,  who  listened  to  both,  but  turned 
surely  at  last  away  from  the  setting  to  the  rising  sun. 
At  last  there  came  the  day  of  which  Harrison  Gray  Otis, 
then  a  school-boy  nine  years  old,  has  left  us  his  account. 
I  must  recite  to  you  his  graphic  words :  "  On  the  19th  of 
April,  1775,  I  went  to  school  for  the  last  time.  In  the 
morning,  about  seven,  Percy's  Brigade  was  drawn  up,  ex- 
tending from  Scollay's  building  through  Tremont  Street 
and  nearly  to  the  bottom  of  the  Mall,  pi'eparing  to  take 
up  their  march  for  Lexington.  A  corporal  came  up  to 
me  as  I  was  going  to  school  and  turned  me  off  to  pass 
down  Court  Street,  which  I  did,  and  came  up  School  Street 
to  the  school-house.  It  may  well  be  imagined  that  great 
agitation  prevailed,  the  British  line  being  drawn  up  a  few 
yards  only  from  the  school-house  door.  As  I  entered  the 
school  I  heard  the  announcement  of  Deponite  libros,  and 
ran  home  for  fear  of  the  regulars." 

That  was  the  end  of  one  scene  of  our  drama :  with  the 
departing  form  of  little  Otis  running  home  ''for  fear  of 
the  regulars"  ends  the  administration  of  Master  Lovell 
and  closes  the  distinctively  eighteenth-century  period  of 
our  history.  The  master  himself  disapj^ears  soon  with 
the  evacuating  British.  His  son  James  was  carried  off  a 
prisoner,  perhaps  in  the  same  ship,  no  doubt  in  revengeful 
memory  of  the  oration  which  he  had  dared  to  deliver  in 
the  old  South  Meeting-House  in  honor  of  the  victims  of 
the  Boston  Massacre. 

There  is  nothing  heroic  about  Master  Lovell.  It  was 
not  an  heroic  nature.  It  was  not  an  heroic  world  in  which 
he  lived.  The  lamps  were  being  overtaken  by  the  sunrise, 
and  looked  pale  and  belated  as  they  always  do.  But  he 
will  ever  be  remembered  as  one  who  served  his  city  well 
according  to  his  light.     He  keeps  and  will  long  keep  a 


416  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

local  fame.  He  is  of  that  class  of  men  whose  monuments 
we  read  everywhere  in  quaint  and  ancient  towns,  and  own 
that  tliongh  their  fame  never  overleaped  the  walls  within 
wliich  they  were  born,  jei  it  is  better  for  the  world  that 
they  have  lived  than  that  many  a  great  man  with  whom 
Fame  and  her  silly  trumpet  have  been  busy  should  have 
strutted  on  his  loftier  stage.  They  have  given  great  faith- 
fulness to  little  things,  and  no  one  can  say  how  wide- 
reaching  the  results  have  been.  ^^  In  tenni  labor  at  tenuis 
no)i  gloria."  We  smile  at  their  exaggerated  eulogy,  but 
are  glad  that  their  city  does  them  honor.  So  we  may 
leave  the  good  name  of  John  Lovell  to  the  safe-keeping 
of  his  grateful  town  of  Boston. 

You  will  remind  me,  if  I  do  not  soon  remind  myself, 
that  I  have  not  undertaken  to  write  the  whole  history  of 
the  Latin  School,  but  only  to  recall  something  of  the  spirit 
of  what  its  past  has  been,  letting  my  thoughts  gather  es- 
pecially about  the  names  of  its  three  great  masters,  who 
mark  the  three  centuries  in  which  it  has  lived.  Remem- 
bering this,  I  must  not  pause  to  remind  j'ou  of  how,  after 
LovelPs  flight,  the  school  was  closed  for  more  than  a  year, 
and  of  how  then  it  was  reopened  under  the  mastership  of 
Samuel  Hunt.  His  reign  has  left  severer  memories  than 
that  of  any  other  of  our  masters.  As  we  listen  at  the 
windows  which  the  recollections  of  some  of  his  pupils 
have  left  open,  it  is  almost  like  Virgil's  awful  record : 

"Hinc  exaudiri  gemitus  et  sJBva  sonare 
Verbera ;  turn  stridor  fen-i  traetfeqiie  eateriEe." 

After  him  came  William  Bigelow,  of  whom  there  re- 
mains no  strong  mark  on  our  annals.  Then  to  a  school 
fallen  a  good  deal  into  degeneracy,  as  if  to  set  it  in  order 
for  the  demands  of  another  century,  came  the  wise,  ener- 
getic administration  of  Master  Benjamin  Apthorp  Gould, 
the  teacher  of  Emerson,  and  Motley,  and  Adams,  and  Win- 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  417 

throp,  aud  Sumner,  and  Hillard,  and  Beecher,  and  James 
Freeman  Clarke.  We  have  come  now  to  familiar  names 
aud  days.  We  are  binding  the  pride  of  modern  Boston 
very  closely  to  the  promise  of  the  past  when  we  see  the 
boys  of  1824  come  forward  to  receive  their  prizes  at  the 
hands  of  Master  Gould.  Charles  Sumner  has  written  a 
translation  from  Sallust  for  which  he  receives  two  doUars 
as  a  second  prize ;  and  a  translation  from  Ovid  for  which 
one  dollar  is  thought  enough,  George  S.  Hillard  has  two 
doUars  for  the  thu*d  declamation  prize,  and  is  loaded  down 
with  other  rewards  of  merit.  Robei't  C.  Winthrop  has 
written  a  Latin  poem  for  which  he  wins  a  second  prize 
and  gets  six  doUars.  Epes  S.  Dixwell  was  even  then  sing- 
ing in  Latin  odes  his  hymn  for  that  year,  bringing  him 
just  as  much  as  Mr.  Winthrop's  poem.  Not  this  year,  but 
the  next,  James  F.  Clarke  gets  the  first  prize  for  an  Eng- 
lish poem,  and  little  Wendell  Phillips  gains  one  of  six 
third  prizes  for  declamation. 

To  read  those  old  catalogues  makes  the  last  sixty  years 
seem  very  short.  The  masters  and  scholars  of  those  days 
are  only  the  masters  and  scholars  of  to-day  standing  just 
•  far  enough  off  for  us  to  study  them.  The  dusty  dradgery 
of  the  school-room  has  settled,  and  we  can  see  its  mean- 
ings clearly.  Let  us  pause  a  moment  and  think  what  this 
school-keeping  and  school-going  means.  There  stands  the 
master,  like  a  priest  between  the  present  and  the  past, 
between  the  living  and  the  dead,  between  the  ideas  and 
the  life  of  the  world.  His  is  a  noble,  nay,  a  holy,  priest- 
hood. He  is  the  lens  through  which  truth  pours  itself 
on  young  human  souls ;  he  is  the  window  through  which 
fresh  young  ej-es  look  out  at  human  life ;  and  there  around 
him  sit  his  scholars.  Like  Homer's  heroes,  Mr.  Hillard 
says  they  are,  in  the  frankness  and  directness  of  tlieir 
life.  They  make  their  friendships  and  their  feuds.  The.y 
meet  the  old  temptations  with  their  sublime  young  con- 


418  ESSAYS  AND   ADDBESSES. 

fidence.  That  school  life  is  to  them  their  hill  of  Ida  or 
their  palace  of  Jerusalem.  They  are  Paris  or  Solomon  in 
their  critical  encounters  with  the  nobler  and  the  baser 
allurements  of  their  life.  Yet  tor  the  time  they  live  imvj:- 
niiiceutly  apart.  The  old  woi-ld  roars  around  them  and 
they  do  not  care,  but  live  their  separate  life  and  are  in 
no  impatience  for  State  Street  or  Court  Street.  In  these 
days  School  Sti-eet  and  the  Common  and  the  Charles  River 
made  their  sufficient  world.  This  ever-recurring  hfe  of 
the  new  generations,  this  narrow  life  of  boyhood,  opening 
by  and  by  into  the  larger  experience  of  manhood,  to  be 
narrowed  again  into  the  boyhood  of  their  children,  and 
so  on  perpetually — this  makes  the  rhythmic  life  of  the 
community.  It  is  the  systole  and  diastole  of  the  city's 
heart. 

Master  Gould  passes  away,  and  Master  Leverett  suc- 
ceeds. He  was  scholarly  and  gracious,  and  goes  down 
the  road  of  sure  and  well-earned  fame  with  his  dictionary 
under  his  arm.  Then  Master  Dillaway,  our  honored  presi- 
dent, takes  up  the  scepter,  and  wins  the  gi-ateful  honor 
which  he  has  never  lost.  Then  Mr.  Dixwell  begins  his 
long  respected  reign,  which  will  henceforward  be  com- 
memorated by  this  speakmg  portrait.  The  old  walls  in 
Bedford  Street  have  disappeared,  but  they  would  almost 
rise  up  fi'om  the  dust  to  protest  against  my  effrontery  if 
I  dared  to  say  more  than  to  pay  passing  tribute  to  his 
mastership  with  this  one  woi'd  of  thanks.  Who  is  the 
scholar,  that  he  should  forget  himself  and  exercise  his 
irreverent  analysis  on  his  old  master  to  his  living  face  ? 
Long  may  it  be  before  any  of  his  scholars  has  the  right 
to  do  it.  But  with  the  close  of  Mr.  Dixwell's  rule  came 
Francis  Gardner.  That  is  to  say,  that  remarkable  man 
then  became  head-master  of  the  school  of  which  he  had 
long  been  underteacher.  How  shall  I  speak  of  him  in 
the  presence  of  so  many  of  his  old  boys,  to  whom  he  is  a 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  419 

never-fading  memory  f  At  least  I  know  that  he  will  be 
a  very  vivid  recollection  with  you  as  I  speak. 

The  character  and  work  of  Francis  Gardner  will  furnish 
subjects  of  discussion  as  long  as  any  men  live  who  were 
his  pupils,  and  perhaps  long-  after  the  latest  of  his  schol- 
ars shall  have  tottered  to  the  grave.  But  certain  things 
will  always  be  clear  regarding  him,  and  will  insure  his 
perpetual  remembrance,  especially  these  two :  his  whole 
life  was  bound  up  in  the  school  and  its  interests ;  and  his 
originality  and  intensity  of  mind  and  nature  exercised  the 
strongest  influence  over  the  boys  who  passed  luider  his 
charge. 

This  last  is  the  best  thing,  after  all,  that  a  teacher  can 
bring  to  his  scholars.  Best  of  all  things  which  can  hap- 
pen to  a  school-boy  is  the  contact  with  a  vigorous  and 
strongly  marked  nature  which  breaks  its  cords  and  snaps 
its  shells,  and  sets  it  free  for  whatever  it  has  in  it  the 
capacity  to  do  and  be. 

M}^  honored  and  beloved  classmate  and  friend.  Dr.  Wil- 
liam Reynolds  Dimmock,  himself  a  notable  instructor,  has 
left  a  very  complete  account  of  Dr.  Gardner  in  the  memo- 
rial address  which  he  delivered  at  the  time  of  our  master's 
death.  In  his  wa}'  he  did  for  Francis  Gardner  what  Cot- 
ton Mather  did  two  centuries  before  for  Ezekiel  Cheever. 
As  I  read  his  graphic  pages  I  feel  very  strongly  what  I 
have  already  suggested,  that  in  Gardner  the  century  to 
which  he  belonged  is  very  strikingly  embodied.  Think 
of  him,  O  my  fellow-students,  as  he  sat  upon  his  platform 
or  moved  about  the  hall  among  our  desks  thirty  years 
ago !  Tall,  gaunt,  muscular,  uncouth  in  bodj' ;  quaint, 
sineAvy,  severe  in  thought  and  speech ;  impressing  every 
boy  with  the  strong  sense  of  vigor,  now  lovel}^  and  now 
hateful,  but  never  for  a  moment  tame,  or  dull,  or  false ; 
indignant,  passionate,  an  athlete  both  in  mind  and  body 
— think  what  an  interesting  mixture  of  opposites  he  was ! 


420  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

He  was  proud  of  himself,  his  school,  his  city,  and  his  time  ; 
yet  no  man  saw  more  clearly  the  faults  of  each,  or  was 
more  discontented  with  them  aU.  He  was  one  of  the 
frankest  of  men,  and  yet  one  of  the  most  reserved.  He 
was  the  most  patient  mortal,  and  the  most  impatient. 
He  was  one  of  the  most  earnest  of  men,  and  yet  nobody, 
probably  not  even  himself,  knew  his  positive  belief  upon 
any  of  the  deepest  themes.  He  was  almost  a  sentimental- 
ist with  one  swing  of  the  pendulum,  and  almost  a  cynic 
with  the  next.  There  was  sympathy  not  unmixed  with 
mockery  in  his  grim  smile.  He  clung  with  almost  obsti- 
nate conservatism  to  the  old  standards  of  education,  while 
he  defied  the  conventionalities  of  ordinary  life  with  every 
movement  of  his  restless  frame.  Can  you  not  see  him  as 
we  spoke  our  pieces  on  the  stage,  bored  ourselves  and 
boring  oiir  youtlif  ul  audiences,  and  no  doubt  boring  him, 
with  the  unreality  of  the  whole  preposterous  performance  f 
Can  you  not  see  him  in  his  restlessness  taking  advantage 
of  the  occasion  to  climb  and  dust  off  the  pallid  bust  of 
Pallas,  which  stood  over  the  school-room  door,  and  thun- 
dering down  from  his  ladder  some  furious  correction  which 
for  an  instant  broke  the  cloud  of  sham  and  sent  a  light- 
ning flash  of  reality  into  the  dreary  speech?  Can  you 
not  liear  him  as  he  swept  the  grammar  with  its  tinkling 
lists  aside  for  an  liour,  and  very  possibly  with  a  blackboard 
illustration  enforced  some  point  of  fundamental  morals 
in  a  way  his  students  never  could  forget  ?  Can  you  not 
feel  his  proverbs  and  his  phrases,  each  hard  as  iron  with 
perpetual  use,  come  pelting  across  the  hall,  finding  the 
weak  spot  in  your  self-complacency,  and  making  it  sensi- 
tive and  humble  ever  since  ? 

He  was  a  narrow  man  in  the  intensity  with  which  he 
thought  of  his  profession.  I  heard  him  say  once  that  he 
never  knew  a  nuin  who  had  failed  as  a  schoolmaster  to 
succeed  in  any  other  occupation.     And  yet  he  was  a  broad 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  421 

man  in  his  idea  of  the  range  whicli  he  conceived  that  his 
teaching  ought  to  cover.  He  made  the  shabby  old  school- 
house  to  blossom  Avith  the  first  suggestions  of  the  artistic 
side  of  classical  study,  with  busts  and  pictures,  with  pho- 
togi-aphs  and  casts ;  and  hosts  of  men  who  have  forgotten 
every  grammar  rule,  and  cannot  tell  an  ablative  from  an 
accusative,  nor  scan  a  verse  of  Virgil,  nor  conjugate  the 
least  irregular  of  regular  verbs  to-day,  still  feel,  while  all 
these  flimsy  superstructures  of  their  study  have  vanished 
like  the  architecture  of  a  dream,  the  solid  moral  basis  of 
respect  for  work  and  honor,  for  pure  truthfulness,  which 
he  put  under  it  all,  still  lying  sound  and  deep  and  unde- 
cayed. 

Mr.  Gai'dner's  great  years  were  the  years  of  the  war. 
It  would  have  been  a  sad  thing  if  the  mighty  struggle  of 
the  nation  for  its  life  had  found  in  the  chief  teacher  of  the 
boys  of  Boston  a  soul  either  hostile  or  indifferent.  The 
soul  which  it  did  find  was  all  alive  for  freedom  and  for 
union.  The  last  news  from  the  battle-field  came  hot  into 
the  school-room,  and  made  the  close  air  tingle  with  inspi- 
ration. He  told  the  boj'^s  about  Gettysburg  as  Cheever 
must  have  told  his  boys  about  Marston  Moor,  and  Lovell 
must  have  told  his  about  Ticonderoga.  He  formed  his 
pupils  into  companies  and  regiments,  and  drilled  with 
them  himself.  It  was  a  war  which  a  great  master  might 
well  praise,  and  into  which  a  school  full  of  generous  pupils 
might  well  throw  their  whole  souls,  for  it  was  no  war  of 
mere  military  prowess.  It  was  a  war  of  j^i'inciples.  It 
was  a  war  whose  soldiers  were  citizens.  It  was  a  war 
which  hated  war-making,  and  whose  methods  were  kept 
transparent  always  with  their  sacred  purposes  shining 
clearly  through.  Such  a  war  mothers  might  pray  for  as 
their  sons  went  forth,  masters  might  bid  their  scholars 
pause  from  their  books  and  listen  to  the  throbbing  of  the 
distant  cannon.     The  statue  of  the  school  honoring  her 


422  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

heroic  dead,  uuder  whose  shadow  the  boys  will  go  and 
come  about  their  studies  every  day  for  generations,  will 
fire  no  young  heart  with  the  passion  for  niilitar}^  glory, 
but  it  will  speak  patriotism  and  self-devotion  from  its 
silent  lips  so  long  as  the  school-boys  come  and  go.  Two 
hundred  and  eighty-seven  graduates  of  the  school  served 
in  the  war  with  the  rebellion,  and  fifty-one  laid  down  their 
lives.  Who  of  us  is  there  that  does  not  believe  that  the 
school  where  they  were  trained  had  something  to  do  with 
the  simple  courage  with  wdiich  each  of  these  heroic  men 
went  forth  to  do  the  duty  of  the  hour  ? 

"  Patriseque  impendcre  vitam 
Nee  sibi  sed  toti  geiiitum  se  credere  mundo." 

The  life  of  Francis  Gardner  was  not  without  a  certain 
look  of  pathos,  even  in  the  eyes  of  his  light-hearted  pupils. 
As  we  looked  back  upon  it  after  we  had  left  him,  we 
always  thought  of  it  as  sad.  That  color  of  pain  and  dis- 
appointment grew  deeper  in  it  as  it  approached  its  end. 
It  was  no  smug,  smooth,  rounded,  satisfactory^  career.  It 
was  full  of  vehemence  and  contradiction  and  disturbance. 
He  was  not  always  easy  for  the  boys  to  get  along  with. 
Probably  it  was  not  always  easy  for  him  to  get  along  Avith 
himself.  But  it  has  left  a  strength  of  truth  and  honor 
and  devoted  manliness  which  will  always  be  a  treasure  in 
the  school  he  loved.  The  very  confusion  and  struggle 
always  after  something  greater  than  itself  make  it  a  true 
typical  life  of  the  century  in  which  he  Hved.  We  look 
into  his  stormy  face  upon  our  walls,  and  bid  him  at  last 
rest  in  peace. 

I  must  not  tell  of  those  who  have  succeeded  him ;  not 
of  him  whom  death  removed  almost  as  soon  as  he  was 
seated  in  the  master's  chair ;  not  of  him  who  to-day  so 
wisely  and  happily  and  strongly  rules  the  venerable  school. 
I  hope  that  you  can  see  as  I  do  how  our  whole  history 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  423 

falls  into  shape  about  these  three  great  masters  to  whom 
I  have  given  most  of  my  discourse.  Let  that  be  the  pic- 
tui*e  which  is  left  upon  our  memories.  Cheever  and  Lovell 
and  Gardner !  The  Puritan,  the  Tory,  and,  shall  we  not 
say  in  some  fuller  sense,  the  man — are  they  not  character- 
istic figures?  One  belongs  to  the  century  of  Milton,  one 
to  the  century  of  Johnson,  one  to  the  century  of  Carlyle. 
One's  eye  is  on  the  New  Jerusalem,  one's  soul  is  all  wrapped 
up  in  Boston,  one  has  caught  sight  of  humanity.  One 
is  of  the  century  of  faith,  one  of  the  century  of  common 
sense,  one  of  the  centmy  of  conscience.  One  teaches  his 
boys  the  Christian  doctrine,  one  bids  them  keep  the  order 
of  the  school,  one  inspires  them  to  do  their  duty.  The 
times  they  represent  are  great  expanses  on  the  sea  of  time ; 
one  shallower,  one  deeper,  than  the  others.  Through  them 
all  sails  on  the  constant  school,  with  its  monotonous  rou- 
tines like  the  clattering  machinery  of  a  great  ship,  which, 
over  many  w^aters  of  different  depths,  feeling  now  the 
deepness  and  now  the  shallowness  under  its  keel,  presses 
along  to  some  sea  of  the  future  which  shall  be  better  than 
them  all. 

To  that  distant  sea  and  the  waters  which  are  still  to 
cross  before  it  shall  be  reached,  to  the  future  of  the  Latin 
School  for  which  all  this  past  has  been  preparing,  let  me 
dii'ect  your  thoughts  for  a  few  moments  before  I  close. 
Our  century  is  growing  better  toward  its  end.  With  the 
wealth  and  richness  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries  gathered  and  distilled  into  its  life,  the  nineteenth 
century  has  been  larger  and  nobler  than  them  both.  Its 
master  is  the  greatest  of  the  three.  What  sort  of  figure 
shall  we  picture  to  ourselves  the  master  of  the  Latin  School 
who  shall  illustrate  the  twentieth  century,  the  gates  of 
which  are  almost  ready  to  swing  back  ?  Wliat  shall  be 
the  life  which  he  will  govern  and  will  help  to  create "?  It 
will  bear,  no  doubt,  the  same  great  general  features  which 


424  ESSAYS  jxn  add n esses. 

have  marked  the  past,  but  with  more  generous  and  broad 
development.     Let  me  only  make  three  easy  prophecies : 

1.  In  the  twentieth  century,  as  in  those  which  have 
gone  before,  our  school  will  be  a  city  school.  Its  students 
will  find  that  enlargement  of  thought  and  life  which  comes 
from  close  personal  connection  in  the  most  sensive  years 
with  the  public  life.  Here,  let  me  say  again,  is  a  blessing 
which  no  private  school  can  give.  The  German  states- 
man, if  50U  talk  with  him,  will  tell  you  that,  with  every 
evil  of  his  great  mihtary  system,  which  makes  every  citi- 
zen a  soldier  for  some  portion  of  his  life,  it  j-et  has  one 
redeeming  good :  it  brings  each  young  man  of  the  land 
once  in  his  life  directly  into  the  country's  service,  lets 
him  directly  feel  its  touch  of  dignity  and  power,  makes 
him  proud  of  it  as  his  personal  commander,  and  so  insures 
a  more  definite  and  vivid  loj-alty  through  all  his  life. 
More  graciousl}^,  more  healthily,  more  Cliristianl}^,  the 
American  public  school  does  what  the  barracks  and  the 
drill-room  try  to  do.  Would  that  its  blessing  might  be 
made  absolutely  imiversal !  Would  that  it  might  be  so 
arranged  that  once  in  the  life  of  every  Boston  boy,  if  only 
for  three  months,  he  might  be  a  pupil  of  a  public;  school, 
might  see  his  city  sitting  in  the  teacher's  chair,  might 
find  himself,  along  with  boys  of  all  degrees  and  classes, 
simply  recognized  by  his  community  as  one  of  her  chil- 
dren !  It  would  put  an  element  into  his  character  and  life 
which  he  would  never  lose.  It  would  insure  the  unity 
and  public  spirit  of  our  citizens.  It  would  add  tenderness 
and  pride  and  gratitude  to  the  more  base  and  sordid  feel- 
ings with  which  her  sons  rejoice  in  their  mother's  wealth 
and  strength  and  fame. 

2.  And  again,  our  school  always  must  be,  in  the  twen- 
tieth century  as  well  as  in  the  nineteenth,  a  school  of 
broad  and  undivided  scholarship.  No  doubt  her  teaching 
will  grow  more  comprehensive  as  the  years  go  on.     The 


THE  BOSTON  LATIN  SCHOOL.  -125 

Latin  and  Greek  classics  are  destined  not  to  be  dropped 
out  of  our  culture,  but  to  share  with  other  studies  the  gen- 
erous task  of  developing-  the  youthful  powers  and  laying 
the  foundation  for  the  more  special  work  of  life.  They 
must  accept  their  place  and  learn  to  teach  in  easier  and 
quicker  ways  those  lessons  for  which  men  wiU  have  less 
leisure  than  they  used  to  have,  but  which  they  never  will 
consent  to  leave  entii*ely  unlearned.  The  sciences  of  phys- 
ical nature  will  open  more  and  more  capacity  for  the  de- 
velopment of  character  and  thought.  Art  and  the  modern 
speech  and  life  of  man  will  j)i"ove  themselves  able  to  do 
much  for  which  it  has  seemed  as  if  only  the  study  of  anti- 
quity had  the  power.  Changes  like  these  must  come,  and 
will  be  welcome.  But  the  first  principle  of  liberal  learn- 
ing, the  principle  that  all  special  education  must  open  out 
of  a  broad  general  culture  which  is  practical  only  in  the 
deepest  and  the  truest  sense,  must  ever  be  the  principle 
which  rules  and  shapes  our  school.  ''  The  strictly  practi- 
cal is  not  practical  enough,"  says  a  wise  ^vi'iter  upon  edu- 
cation. To  the  education  which  is  most  practical  because 
it  aims  at  that  breadth  of  nature  in  which  all  special  prac- 
tices shall  by  and  by  come  to  their  best,  let  us  dedicate 
our  school  anew. 

3.  And,  yet  once  more,  the  school,  with  its  continuous 
history  running  on  into  the  new  centuries,  as  it  has  run 
through  these  three,  taking  the  boys  who  are  to-day  un- 
born and  educating  them  for  the  duties  which  the  exigen- 
cies of  the  new  centuries  are  to  bring,  will  bear  perpet- 
ual witness  that  civic  manhood  is  the  same  always.  The 
school  of  the  period  may  start  out  of  the  exigencies  of  the 
period,  and  perish  with  the  period  that  gave  it  birth.  It 
bears  its  testimony  of  how  every  age  is  exceptional  and 
different  from  every  other.  Our  school,  the  school  of 
Cheever  and  Lovell  and  Gardner,  bears  witness  to  a  no- 
bler, deeper  truth — the  truth  that,  however  circumstances 


426  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

may  change,  the  necessary  bases  of  public  and  private 
character  are  still  the  same ;  that  truth  and  bravery  and 
patriotism  and  manliness  are  the  foundations  of  private 
and  public  happiness  and  strength,  not  merely  in  the  sev- 
enteenth and  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries,  but  in 
the  twentieth  century  and  all  the  centuries  to  come  until 
the  end. 

A  great  school  is  a  great  person,  only  it  has,  what  we 
men  vainly  desire,  the  privilege  of  growing  mature  with- 
out any  of  the  weakness  of  growing  old,  the  ripeness  of 
age  with  none  of  its  premonitions  of  decay.  We  greet 
our  school  to-night,  then,  venerable  in  its  antiquity,  but 
with  the  dew  of  perpetual  youth  upon  its  forehead.  We 
congratulate  the  boys,  its  present  pupils,  who  feel  the 
thrill  along  its  deck  as  the  old  ship  sails  bravely  through 
the  straits  of  this  commemoration  and  catches  sight  of 
vast  new  seas  beyond.  We  commend  her  to  the  great 
wise  future,  to  the  needs  and  the  capacities  of  the  coining 
generations,  to  the  care  of  the  God  of  the  fathers,  who 
will  be  tlie  God  of  the  children  too.  With  the  same  kind 
heart  and  with  \Qt  wiser  hands  may  she  who  educated  us 
educate  the  boys  of  Boston  for  centuries  to  come,  so  long 
as  the  harbor  flashes  in  the  sunlight  and  the  State  House 
shines  upon  the  hill ! 


BIOGRAPHY. 

(March  4,  1886.) 

I  HAVE  been  anxious  to  choose  a  suliject  for  my  lecture 
which  should  have  to  do  both  mth  literature  and  with  life. 
I  have  pictured  to  myself  what  now  I  see  before  me,  an 
assemblage  of  young  men  to  whom  the  two  w^orlds — the 
world  of  books  and  the  Avorld  of  men — were  freshly  and 
delightfully  opening.  Let  me  take  some  subject  for  my 
evening's  talk,  I  said  to  myself,  which  shall  bring  those 
two  great  worlds  together ;  and  so  I  have  come  to  speak 
to  you  about  biography. 

Biography  is,  in  its  very  name,  the  literature  of  life. 
It  is  especially  the  literature  of  the  individual  human  life. 
All  true  literature  is  the  expression  of  life  of  some  sort. 
Books  are  the  pictures  into  which  life  passes  as  the  land- 
scape passes  through  the  artist's  brain  into  the  glowing 
canvas,  gaining  thereby  that  which  it  had  not  in  itself, 
but  also  turning  forth  to  sight  its  own  more  subtle  and 
spii'itual  meanings.  And  since  the  noblest  life  on  earth 
is  always  human  life,  the  literature  whii^h  deals  with  hu- 
man life  must  always  be  the  noblest  literature.  And  since 
the  individual  human  life  must  always  have  a  distinctness 
and  interest  which  cannot  belong  to  any  of  the  groups  of 
human  lives,  biography  must  always  have  a  charm  which 
no  other  kind  of  history  can  rival. 

I  think  that  I  would  rather  have  written  a  great  l)iog-  <     y: 
i-aphy  than  a  great  book  of  any  other  sort,  as  I  would 
rather  have  paiuted  a  great  portrait  than  any  other  kind 
of  picture.     At  any  rate,  the  writing  of  a  biography,  or, 

427 


428  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

indeed,  the  pro|)er  reading  of  it,  requires  one  faculty  which 
is  not  very  common,  and  which  does  not  come  into  action 
without  some  experience.  It  requires  the  power  of  hirge 
vital  imagination,  the  power  of  conceiving  of  a  life  as  a 
whole.  Do  you  remember,  when  you  were  a  child,  how 
vague  the  city  which  you  lived  in  was  to  you  ?  Certain 
houses  in  the  city,  certain  streets,  you  knew ;  but  the  city 
as  a  whole — Boston,  or  Springfield,  or  New  York — one 
total  thing — you  had  to  grow  older  and  make  more  asso- 
ciations, and  get  more  ideality,  before  you  could  lay  hold 
of  that.  You  had  to  comprehend  it,  to  grasp  around  it, 
as  it  were.  So  it  is  with  a  life.  To  know  the  list  of 
Napoleon's  achievements,  to  be  able  to  quote  a  page  of 
Carlyle's  writings — that  is  one  thing ;  but  to  have  Napo- 
leon Bonaparte  or  Thomas  Carlyle  stand  out  distinct,  a 
complete  being  by  himself,  a  unit  among  unities,  like  a 
mountain  rising  out  of  tlie  plain,  like  a  star  shining  in 
the  sky — that  is  another  thing  and  very  different.  That 
needs  a  special  power.  He  who  has  not  that  power  is 
not  fit  to  read,  much  less  fit  to  write,  a  biography. 

It  must  always  be  a  noteworthy  fact  that  the  great 
book  of  the  world  is  the  story  of  a  life.  The  New  Testa- 
ment is  a  biography.  Make  it  a  mere  book  of  dogmas, 
and  its  vitality  is  gone.  Make  it  a  book  of  laws,  and  it 
grows  hard  and  untimeh^  Make  it  a  biography,  and  it 
is  a  true  book  of  life.  Make  it  the  history  of  Jesus  of 
Nazareth,  and  tlie  world  holds  it  in  its  heart  forever.  Not 
simply  His  coming  or  His  going,  not  simply  His  birth  or 
His  death,  but  the  living,  the  total  life,  of  Jesus  is  the 
world's  salvation.  And  the  Book  in  which  His  life  shines 
orbed  and  distinct  is  the  world's  treasure.  There,  as  in 
all  best  biographies,  two  values  of  a  marked  and  well- 
depicted  life  appear.  It  is  of  value,  first,  because  it  is  ex- 
ceptional, and  also  because  it  is  representative.  Every 
life  is  at  once  like  and  unhke  every  other.     Every  good 


BIOGIIAPHY.  429 

stoiy  of  a  life,  therefore,  sets  before  those  who  read  it 
something  which  is  imitable  and  something  which  is  in- 
capable of  imitation ;  and  thereby  come  two  different  sorts 
of  stimidus  and  inspiration.  It  gives  us  help  like  that  of 
the  stars  which  guide  the  ship  from  without,  and  also  hke 
that  of  the  fii'e  which  burns  beneath  the  engines  of  the 
ship  itself. 

But  let  me  come  to  my  lecture.  I  want  to  divide  what 
I  have  to  say  to  you  about  biograpliies  into  three  parts. 
I  want  to  speak  to  you  about  the  subjects  of  biographies, 
and  the  writers  of  biographies,  and  the  readers  of  biogra- 
phies. A  life  must  first  be  lived,  and  then  it  must  be 
written,  and  then  it  must  be  read,  before  the  power  of  a 
biography  is  quite  complete. 

You  sit  some  day  in  your  study  reading  Boswell's 
"Johnson."  Are  there  not  three  people  holding  com- 
munion with  one  another  in  that  silent  room — Johnson 
and  Boswell  and  you?  Johnson  lived  the  life,  Boswell 
wrote  it,  you  are  reading  it.  It  is  like  the  sun,  the  atmo- 
sphere, and  the  earth,  making  one  system.  The  sun  shines 
through  the  atmosphere  to  give  the  earth  its  warmth  and 
richness.  This  is  what  makes  every  picture  of  a  man 
reading  and  being  influenced  by  a  biography  an  interest- 
ing thing.  It  is  the  completeness  of  this  group  of  three. 
John  Stuart  Mill  tells  us  about  the  inspiration  which  came 
to  him,  when  he  was  a  young  man,  from  Plato's  "  Pictures 
of  Socrates.''  And,  among  modern  biographies,  he  re- 
members the  value  which  he  found  in  Condorcet's  "  Life 
of  Turgot" — ^'abook,"  he  says,  ''well  calculated  to  rouse 
the  best  sort  of  enthusiasm,  since  it  contains  one  of  the 
wisest  and  noblest  of  lives,  delineated  by  one  of  the  wisest 
and  noblest  of  men."  In  that  sentence  you  can  see  the 
three  together — Turgot,  Condorcet,  and  Mill.  In  another 
part  of  his  autobiographj^,  the  same  great  Englishman 
records  how  he  was  rescued  from  extreme  depression  by 


430  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  reading  of  something  in  the  "  Memoirs  of  Marmontel," 
the  most  picturesque  of  literary  histories.  Or  one  hkes 
to  think  of  Dr.  Franklin  lying  on  what  proved  to  be  his 
death-bed  and  listening  to  the  reading  of  Johnson's  "  Lives 
of  the  Poets."  There  is  something  very  impressive  in 
letting  our  imagination  picture  the  stately  and  sonorous 
doctor  bringing  in  and  introducing  the  singers  one  by 
one  before  the  calm  eyes  of  the  homely  but  sympathetic 
philosopher.  You  ought  never  to  read  a  biography  with- 
out letting  such  a  group  construct  itself  for  your  imagi- 
nation. Johnson,  and  Boswell,  and  you — all  three  are 
there  :  the  subject,  the  author,  and  the  reader.  Your  read- 
ing will  be  a  live  thing  if  j^ou  can  feel  the  presence  of 
your  two  companions,  and  make  them,  as  it  were,  feel 
youi's. 

1.  Let  me  speak,  then,  first,  about  the  subjects  of  biog- 
raphies. I  believe  fully  that  the  intrinsic  life  of  any  hu- 
man being  is  so  interesting  that  if  it  can  be  simply  and 
sympathetically  put  in  words  it  wiU  be  legitimately  inter- 
esting to  other  men.  Have  you  never  noticed  how  any- 
body, boy  or  man,  who  talks  to  you  about  himself  compels 
your  attention"?  I  say  "who  talks  about  liimseK."  I 
mean,  of  course,  his  true  self.  If  he  talks  about  an  un- 
real, an  affected,  an  imaginary  self,  a  self  which  he  would 
like  to  seem  to  be,  instead  of  the  self  he  really  is,  he  tires 
and  disgusts  you;  but  be  sui*e  of  this,  that  there  is  not 
one  of  us  living  to-day  so  simple  and  monotonous  a  life 
that,  if  he  be  true  and  natural,  his  hfe  faithfully  written 
would  not  be  worthy  of  men's  eyes  and  hold  men's  hearts. 
Not  one  of  us,  therefore,  who,  if  he  be  true  and  pure  and 
natural,  may  not,  though  his  life  never  should  be  written, 
be  interesting  and  stimulating  to  his  fellow-men  in  some 
small  circle  as  they  touch  his  life. 

It  is  this  truth  which  accounts  for  the  power  of  the 
simplest  kind  of  biograpliies — those  which  record  the  Hves 


BIOGRAPHY.  431 

of  obscure  people  who  have  done  no  noteworthy  work  in 
the  world.  I  think  of  two  such  books.  One  of  them  is 
the  "  Story  of  Ida,"  the  life  of  an  Italian  girl  of  exquisite 
character,  and  whose  life  was  the  very  pattern  of  a  humble 
tragedy.  Mr.  Ruskin,  in  his  introduction  to  the  book, 
says,  with  his  usual  exaggeration,  that ''  the  lives  in  which 
the  pnblic  are  interested  are  hardly  ever  worth  writing." 
That,  of  course,  is  qnite  untrue.  But  he  goes  on  to  praise 
and  introduce  a  sweet  and  simple  story,  which  is  a  delight- 
ful illustration  of  the  truth  he  overstates.  It  is  like  a 
flower  pllicked  out  of  the  thousands  of  the  field,  which, 
besides  the  charm  of  its  own  fragrance,  has  the  other 
value,  that  it  reminds  us  how  fragrant  are  all  the  flowers 
which  still  grow  unplucked  in  the  field  from  which  this 
came.  The  other  book  is  very  different.  It  is  Thomas 
Hughes'  "  Memoir  of  a  Brother,"  the  story  of  a  brave, 
hopeful,  consecrated  life,  which  came  to  no  display,  but 
did  its  duty  out  of  sight  and  under  endless  disappoint- 
ment, as  the  stream  wrestles  with  the  hindrances  which 
stop  its  channel  deep  in  the  untrodden  woods. 

These  are  the  lives  which  give  us  faith  in  human  nature, 
the  lives  which  now  and  then  it  is  good  for  somebody  to 
write,  if  only  to  remind  us  how  possible  it  is  for  such 
lives  to  be  lived. 

But  we  must  not  let  ourselves  be  misled  by  such  a  state- 
ment as  that  which  I  quoted  from  Mr.  Euskin,  so  far  as 
to  think  that  notable  and  exceptional  lives  are  not  pecu- 
Harly  entitled  to  biography.  Distinction  is  a  legitimate 
object  of  our  interest,  if  we  do  not  overestimate  its  value. 
Distinction  is  the  emphasis  put  upon  qualities  \yj  circum- 
stances. He  who  listens  to  the  long  music  of  human  liis- 
tory  hears  the  special  stress  with  which  some  great  human 
note  was  uttered  long  ago,  ringing  down  the  ages  and 
mingling  with  and  enriching  the  later  music  of  modern 
days.     It  is  a  perfectly  legitimate  curiosity  with  which 


.432  i:ssAYS  anb  addresses. 

men  ask  about  that  resonant,  far-reaching  life.  They  are 
probably  asking  with  a  deeper  impulse  than  they  know. 
They  are  dimly  aware  that  in  that  famous,  interesting 
man  their  own  humanity — which  it  is  endlessly  pathetic 
to  see  how  men  are  always  tryiug  and  always  failing  to 
understand — is  felt  pulsating  at  one  of  its  most  sensitive 
and  vital  points.  Let  us  think,  then,  of  some  of  the  kinds 
of  famous  men  whom  our  biographies  embalm. 

The  first  class  of  men  whose  lives  ought  specially  to  be 
written  and  read  are  those  rare  men  who  present  broad 
pictures  of  the  healthiest  and  simplest  qualities  of  human 
nature  most  largely  and  attracti^^ely  displayed.  Not  men 
of  eccentricities,  not  men  of  sjiecialties,  but  men  of  uni- 
versal inspiration  and  appeal — men,  shall  we  not  say,  like 
Shakespeare's  Horatio,  to  whom  poor  distracted  Hamlet 
cries : 

"  Thou  art  e'en  as  just  a  man 
As  e'er  my  conversation  coped  withal." 

How  heavily  and  confidently  always  the  disturbed  soul 
rests  on  simple  justice ! 

I  shall  quote  as  illustrations  in  all  my  lecture  only  the 
biographies  of  English-speaking  men  by  English-speaking 
men.  And  in  this  first  category  of  biographies,  preemi- 
nent for  their  broad  humanness,  their  general  healthiness 
of  thought  and  being,  I  do  not  hesitate  a  moment  which 
to  name.  There  are  two  lives  which  stand  out  clearly  as 
the  two  best  biographies  ever  written  in  the  English  lan- 
guage. Carlyle  says,  "In  England  we  have  simply  one 
good  biography,  this  Boswell's  ^Johnson.'"  Certainly 
there  is  one  other  worthy  to  be  set  beside  it,  which  is 
Lockhart's  "  Scott."  Happy  the  boy  who  very  early  gets 
at  those  two  books,  and  feels  and  feeds  upon  the  broad 
and  rich  humanity  of  the  two  men  whom  they  keep  ever 
.picturesque  and  living.     Johnson  and  Scott — so  human 


BIOGRAPHY.  433 

in  their  strength  and  in  their  weakness,  in  their  virtues 
and  in  their  faults :  one  Uke  a  day  of  clouds  and  storms, 
the  other  hke  a  day  of  sunshine  and  bright  breezes,  yet 
both  like  nature,  both  real  in  times  of  unreality,  both  going 
bravely  and  Christianly  into  that  darkness  and  tragieal- 
ness  which  gathered  at  the  last  on  both  their  lives — two 
men  worthy  of  having  their  lives  written,  fortunate  both 
in  the  biographers  who  wrote  their  lives ;  worthy  to  be 
read  and  re-read,  and  read  again  by  all  men  who  want  to 
keep  their  manhood  healthy,  broad,  and  brave,  and  true  ! 
Set  these  two  great  books  first,  then,  easily  first,  among 
English  biographies.  The  streets  of  London  and  the 
streets  of  Edinburgh  live  to-day  with  the  images  of  these 
two  men  more  than  any  others  of  the  millions  who  have 
walked  in  them.  But  in  a  broader  way  the  streets  of  hu- 
man nature  still  live  with  their  presence.  The  unfading 
interest  in  Dr.  Johnson  is  one  of  the  good  signs  of  English 
character.  Men  do  not  read  his  books,  but  they  never 
cease  to  care  about  him.  It  shows  what  hold  the  best 
and  broadest  human  qualities  always  keep  on  the  heart  of 
man.  This  man,  who  had  to  be  coaxed  into  favor  before 
a  request  could  be  asked,  and  whose  friends  and  equals 
were  afraid  to  remonstrate  with  him  except  by  a  round- 
robin,  was  yet  capable  of  the  truest  delicacy,  the  purest 
modest}'',  the  most  religious  love  for  all  that  was  greater 
and  better  than  himself.  But  the  great  ^^alue  of  liim  was 
his  reality.  He  was  a  perpetual  protest  against  the  arti- 
ficialness  and  unreahty  of  that  strange  eighteenth  century 
in  which  he  lived.  And  Walter  Scott,  who  was  thirteen 
years  old  when  Dr.  Johnson-  died,  bore  witness  for  true 
humanity  in  the  next  century,  when  men  were  begmning 
to  delight  in  that  Byronic  scorn  of  life  which  has  deepened 
into  the  pessimism  of  these  later  days,  by  the  healthy  and 
cheery  faith  with  which  he  accepted  the  fact  that,  as  he 
once  wrote,  ''  we  have  all  our  various  combats  to  fight  in 


434  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  best  of  all  possible  worlds,  and  like  brave  fellow-sol- 
diers ought  to  assist  one  another  as  much  as  possible." 

Yes,  it  is  good  for  each  new  generation  of  English- 
speaking  boys  as  tliey  come  on  to  the  stage  of  life  to  find 
two  such  brave  figures  there  already.  Generations  come 
and  go,  but  these  two  brave  men  still  keep  possession  of 
the  stage,  and  do  no  man  can  say  how  much  to  make  and 
keep  life  ever  brave  and  true. 

We  come  to  a  distinctly  different  type  of  biography  when 
we  pass  on  to  speak  of  those  men  whose  written  lives  have 
value  not  from  their  broad  humanity,  but  from  the  way  in 
which  they  gather  up  and  throw  out  into  clear  light  some 
certain  period  of  the  world's  history,  some  special  stage  of 
human  life.  Wonderful  is  this  power  which  an  age  has  to 
select  one  of  its  men,  and  crowd  itself  into  him  and  hold 
him  up  before  the  world  and  say,  ''  Know  me  by  him ! " 
"  The  age  of  Pericles,"  we  say,  or  ''  the  age  of  Lorenzo  de 
Medici,"  and  all  our  study  of  the  history  of  the  fifth  century 
before  Christ,  or  of  the  fifteenth  century  after  Christ,  could 
not  put  us  into  such  clear  possession  of  those  remarkable 
times  as  we  should  have  if  we  really  could  know  Pericles 
or  the  great  Lorenzo.  Of  all  such  books  for  us  Americans 
the  greatest  must  be  Irving's  "Life  of  Washington." 
"  Washington,"  says  Irving,  "  had  very  little  private  life." 
All  the  more  for  that  reason  it  is  true  that  if  yoii  master 
the  public  life  of  Washington  you  have  learned  how  this 
nation  came  to  be.  His  early  share  in  the  French  and 
Indian  wars,  which  was  like  a  trial-trip  of  the  ship  which 
was  afterward  to  fight  with  broader  seas,  his  sympathy 
with  the  first  discontents,  his  slow  approach  to  the  idea 
of  independence,  his  steadfastness  during  the  war,  his  pas- 
sage out  of  military  back  to  civil  life,  all  of  these  make 
his  career  characteristic.  It  is  the  history  of  the  time, 
all  crowded  by  a  sort  of  composite  photograph  into  him. 
Washington  was  by  no  means  the  cold,  unromantic,  pas- 


BIOGRAPHY.  435 

sionless  monster  that  men  have  sometimes  pictured  him 
to  be.  It  was  not  lack  of  qualities  but  poise  of  qualities 
that  made  him  calm.  It  was  not  absence  of  color  but 
harmony  of  color  that  made  his  life  white  and  transparent. 
And  so  it  is  with  no  disparagement  of  the  personal  nature 
of  our  gi"eat  man  that  we  may  claim  as  the  special  value 
of  his  hfe  the  way  in  which  it  sums  up  in  itself  the  pictu- 
resque beginnings  of  our  history.  Read  it  for  that.  Read 
also  Wirt's  ''  Life  of  Patrick  Henry,"  which  is  the  story 
of  another  nature  like  a  lens,  more  brilliant  but  not  less 
true  than  Washington's. 

And  thus  of  many  ages  you  will  find,  if  you  look  for 
it,  the  gi-aphic  man,  who  stands  forever  after  his  age  has 
passed  away,  as  its  picture  and  its  commentary.  Wordd 
you  know  what  sort  of  a  thing  English  life  was  in  the 
fifteenth  century,  the  age  of  the  Inquisition,  of  the  Span- 
ish Armada,  of  the  discovery  of  America,  of  the  Field  of 
the  Cloth  of  Gold  ?  Read  the  direct  and  simple  English 
of  the  "■  Life  of  Cardinal  Wolsey,"  by  his  gentleman  usher, 
George  Cavendish.  Woidd  you  catch  the  spirit  of  adven- 
ture which  filled  the  breezy  days  of  Queen  Elizabeth? 
Would  you  feel  the  throb  of  newly  found  rivers  beating 
through  a  great  new-discovered  continent?  Would  j^ou 
see  the  flashes  of  colors  and  hear  the  bursts  of  song  which 
came  back  in  those  daj^s  from  mysterious  countries  which 
scientific  discovery  had  not  yet  disenchanted  of  their  poetry 
and  reduced  to  prose  ?  Would  you  know  what  it  was  to 
live  in  one  of  the  mornings  of  the  world  when  all  the  birds 
were  singing  and  all  the  eastern  heavens  were  aglow? 
Read  the  '^Life  of  Walter  Raleigh,"  as  it  has  come  down 
to  us  without  a  writer's  name  from  some  enthusiastic  biog- 
rapher of  his  o^vn  time. 

Demand  everywhere  that  the  inarticulate  life  of  a  time 
shall  utter  itself  in  the  life  of  its  typical  man,  as  a  brood- 
ing, smoldering  fii-e  bursts  forth  at  one  point  into  flame. 


436  ESSAYS  AND   ABDBESSES. 

Do  not  feel  that  you  know  any  age  or  country  till  you 
can  clearly  see  its  characteristic  man. 

The  same  is  true  about  a  critical  event.  You  think 
about  the  Great  English  Revolution,  that  convulsion  of 
the  seventeenth  centuiy  which  broke  the  power  of  privi- 
lege in  State  and  Church,  and  made  possible  all  that  is 
happening  in  England  and  America  to-day,  all  that  is 
going  to  happen  in  the  next  hundred  years,  which  a  man 
would  so  like  to  live  and  see.  How  shall  you  get  the 
spirit  and  soul  and  meaning  of  that  great  event,  and  seem 
to  have  actually  seen  it  as  it  came  ?  You  must  know  its 
great  man.  You  must  study  the  life  of  Oliver  Cromwell, 
upon  whom  the  true  historical  instinct  of  Carljde  has 
fastened  as  the  man  who  really  did  the  thing — as  much, 
that  is,  as  any  one  man  did  it,  as  much  as  any  one  man 
ever  does  anything  in  history.  You  must  get  deep  into 
him.  You  must  see  how  he  led  and  was  led ;  how  he 
made  his  times  and  was  made  by  them ;  how  impossible 
it  is  to  take  him  in  imagination  out  of  those  times  and  set 
him  down  in  any  other.  It  does  not  mean  that  you  are 
to  make  him  slavishly  your  hero  and  think  everything  he 
did  was  right,  but  get  the  man,  his  hates,  his  loves,  his 
dreams,  his  blundering  hopes,  his  noble,  hot,  half-forged 
purposes,  his  faith,  his  doubt,  get  all  of  these  in  one  vehe- 
ment person  clear  before  your  soul,  and  then  j^ou  will 
know  how  privilege  had  to  go  and  liberty  had  to  come  in 
England  and  America. 

And  as  an  age  or  an  event,  so  an  occupation  or  a  pro- 
fession reveals  itself  in  a  biography.  Many  of  our  great 
libraries  now  are  divided  and  arranged  both  horizontally 
and  perpendicularly.  All  the  books  on  one  level  belong 
to  the  same  subject ;  all  the  books  in  one  upright  stack 
belong  to  the  same  nation.  So  it  is  with  men  in  history. 
You  may  think  of  all  the  people  in  the  reign  of  Queen 
Elizabeth,  engaged  in  all  their  different  works.     That  is 


BIOGRAPHY.  437 

the  horizontal  conception.  Or  you  may  think  of  all  the 
poets,  or  all  the  carpenters,  or  all  the  sailors  in  the  whole 
series  of  ages.  That  is  the  perpendicularity  of  history. 
If  you  take  the  latter  view,  then,  you  want  some  man  in 
each  profession  who  shall  make  that  profession  a  reality 
to  you.  Do  you  not  know  what  a  soldier  is,  as  no  abstract 
book  could  teach  you,  when  you  have  read  the  pages  which 
our  great  American  soldier  wrote  in  the  days  which  he 
so  piteously  begged  of  death  a  little  time  to  tell  the  story 
of  his  life  ?  He  who  would  understand  the  true  hf e  of  a 
pm*e  scholar,  let  him  read  the  delightful  story  of  Isaac 
Casaubon,  which  was  written  a  few  years  ago  by  Mark 
Pattison,  or,  shall  we  say,  the  life  of  the  pugnacious  Rich- 
ard Bentley,  which  was  written  by  Bishop  Monk,  the  very 
model  of  a  scholar's  life  of  a  scholar?  If  you  want  to 
see  what  it  may  be  to  be  a  minister,  do  not  look  at  the 
parson  of  your  parish,  but  i-ead  Brooke's  "  Life  of  Robert- 
son." When  you  want  to  know  how  bravely  and  brightly 
the  true  lover  and  questioner  of  nature  may  pass  his  days, 
let  the  life  of  that  healthiest  of  naturalists,  Frank  Buck- 
land,  be  your  teacher.  Let  adventure  shine  before  you 
in  the  life  of  Livingstone.  In  every  occupation  you  will 
find  some  representative,  some  man  who  did  that  thing 
most  healthily  and  truly.  It  would  be  good,  I  think,  if 
in  those  critical  years,  sometimes  so  anxiously,  sometimes 
so  very  lightly  passed,  in  which  men  are  deciding  what 
they  are  to  do  with  this  mysterious  gift  of  God  which  we 
call  life,  some  wise  and  sympathetic  teacher,  in  the  coUege 
or  elsewhere,  should  hold  a  class  in  professional  biography, 
and  make  the  most  representative  man  of  each  profession 
tell,  not  by  his  lips  but  by  his  life,  what  sort  of  man  and 
what  sort  of  career  his  occupation  makes.  It  might  save, 
here  and  there,  a  foolish  choice  and  an  unhappy  life. 

And  yet,  again,  there  is  another  class  of  biographies 
which  gives  us  types,  neither  of  times,  nor  of  events,  nor 


438  ASSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

of  professions,  but  of  characters.  Have  you  ever  read 
Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury's  ''  Memoirs,"  the  most  open- 
hearted  of  autobiographies,  and  felt  his  cheery,  self-con- 
ceited voice  bragging  in  your  ear? — the  very  perfection 
of  that  strange,  fantastic  thing  which  his  strange  century 
took  for  a  gentleman,  the  selfish  bully  still  dazzling  his 
own  eyes  and  other  men's  with  the  glare  of  personal  cou- 
rage and  an  easy  generosity.  Put  alongside  of  his  the 
noble  story  which  has  lately  been  given  to  the  world  by 
Leslie  Stephen,  of  his  friend  Henry  Fawcett,  the  blind 
statesman  who,  with  infinite  patience  and  assiduity  and 
resolution  and  intelligence,  conquered  the  prizes  of  use- 
fulness and  honor  in  the  darkness;  or,  turning  to  the 
higher  power  of  religion,  read  the  story  of  the  manly  piety 
of  Ha^^elock,  the  missionary  faith  of  Patterson,  or  the  calm 
progress  out  of  unbelief  into  a  trust  in  God  as  the  one 
refuge  of  the  soul  of  the  fine  intellect  of  Ellen  Watson — 
read  these,  which  are  the  three  best  and  most  healthy  re- 
ligious biographies  I  know,  and  feel  how  character  is  not 
a  thing  of  which  you  can  tell  the  nature  in  a  list  of  quali- 
ties. It  is  something  human  ;  you  must  see  it  in  a  man ; 
you  must  watch  it  kindling  in  an  eye ;  you  must  hear  it 
ringing  in  a  voice ;  and  so  biographies  are  the  best  ser- 
mons. 

Om*  first  feeling,  I  suppose,  is  that  all  great  men  ought 
to  have  their  biographies,  that  all  fine  Hves  are  capable  of 
being  finely  written.  And  yet  we  find  out  by  and  by  that 
some  great  men,  some  very  great  men,  are  unsuited  for 
biography.  Shakespeare  has  no  biography;  and,  much 
as  we  would  like  to  know  Avhat  happened  to  him  in  his 
life,  I  think  we  all  feel  doubtful  whether  we  should  get 
much  of  increased  and  deepened  richness  in  our  thought 
of  him  if  what  he  did  and  said  had  been  recorded.  The 
poet's  life  is  in  his  poems.  The  more  profoundly  and 
spiritually  he  is  a  poet,  the  more  thoroughly  this  is  true. 


BIOGRAPHY.  439 

the  more  impossible  a  biogi'aphy  of  liim  becomes.  Where 
is  the  life  of  Shelley  that  gives  you  any  notion  of  the 
beanty  of  his  soul  ?  The  "  Skylark  "  and  the  "  Cenci "  and 
the  ''Adonais"  are  the  real  events  in  his  history.  You 
fill  yourself  with  them  and  you  know  him.  The  same  is 
true  of  "Wordsworth.  There  is  not,  there  cannot  be,  any 
very  valuable  biography  of  him.  For  this  reason,  I  think 
that  the  young  reader  ought  to  become  well  accustomed 
to  reading  the  whole  works  of  an  author  whom  he  really 
wants  to  know.  I  believe  in  those  long,  comely  series  of 
books  labeled  ''complete  works."  If  you  read  a  poet's 
masterpieces,  jou  know  them.  If  you  have  read  every- 
thing which  he  has  ^vl•itteu,  you  know  him.  When  you 
have  become  convinced  that  some  great  author,  particu- 
larly some  great  poet,  is  really  worthy  of  your  study,  that 
you  must  have  him  not  simply  as  a  recreation  of  an  idle 
hour  Init  as  the  companion  of  your  life,  then  go  and  get 
all  his  works ;  put  them,  as  near  as  may  be,  in  the  order 
in  which  he  wrote  them,  and  read  them  once  at  least, 
straight  through  from  end  to  end.  Let  your  liljrary,  as 
it  slowly  grows,  abound  in  "  complete  works " ;  so  you 
have  men,  entire  men,  upon  your  shelves,  if  you  are  man 
enough  to  bid  them  live  for  you.  This  is,  after  aU,  the 
subtlest  form  in  which  the  biography  of  writing  men  can 
take  its  shape,  and  for  many  writing  men  it  is  the  only 
form  of  biography  which  is  possible. 

I  must  not  say  more  about  the  subjects  of  biographj'. 
These  kinds  of  men  which  I  have  hurriedly  named  are 
the  kinds  of  men  about  whom  other  men  will  ask,  and  so 
about  whom  books  will  be  wi'itten.  These  are  the  stars 
which,  being  in  the  heaven  of  human  life,  and  having 
some  special  color  or  some  special  light,  must  shine. 
There  are  others  no  less  true  and  worthy  of  men's  sight 
than  they,  which  no  inan  sees. 

2.  I  want  to  speak  now  of  the  men  who  wi'ite  biogra- 


440  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

phies,  the  authors.  And,  first  of  all,  there  are  the  men  who 
are  their  own  biographers — the  men  who,  as  the  end  of  life 
approaches,  gather  up  theii'  experiences  and  tell  the  world 
about  themselves  before  they  go.  In  the  great  Ufflzi  Gal- 
lery at  Florence  there  is  a  large  assemblage  of  the  por- 
traits of  the  great  artists,  painted  b}'  themselves.  Nobody 
can  enter  that  vast,  splendid  room,  thronged  with  its  silent 
company,  and  not  be  conscious  of  a  special  sacredness  and 
awe.  Here  is  the  way  in  which  the  great  artists  looked 
to  themselves.  Thus  it  was  that  Raphael  saw  the  painter 
of  the  Sistine  Madonna,  and  thus  Leonardo  conceived  the 
painter  of  the  Last  Supper.  It  is  the  man  himself  telling 
the  story  of  himself  to  himself.  No  wonder  that  each 
stands  out  there  with  a  peculiarly  clear  and  personal  dis- 
tinctness. 

What  that  room  is  in  art,  a  library  of  autobiographies 
is  in  human  life.  People  like  to  teU  us  that  we  do  not 
know  ourselves  so  well  as  our  neighbors  know  us.  I 
rather  think  that  few  maxims  are  less  true  than  that. 
-s\  Our  neighbors  know  our  little  tricks,  of  which  we  are 
unconscious ;  but  any  one  of  us  who  is  at  all  thoughtful 
knows  his  real  heart  and  nature  as  no  other  man  has  be- 
gun to  know  them.  Therefore,  he  who  will  reaUy  teU  us 
about  himself  makes  his  life  stand  forth  very  distinctly 
in  its  unity,  its  separateness,  its  reality. 

Enghsh  literature  is  rich  in  autobiography.  It  has,  in- 
deed, no  tale  so  deep  and  subtle  as  that  which  is  told  in 
the  "  Confessions  of  St.  Augustine."  It  has  no  such  com- 
plete and  unreserved  unbosoming  of  a  life  as  is  given  by 
the  strange  Italian,  Benvenuto  Cellini,  who  is  the  prince 
of  unconcealment.  But  there  is  hardly  any  self -told  life 
in  any  language  which  is  more  attractive  than  the  auto- 
biography of  Edward  Gibbon,  in  which  he  recounts  the 
story  of  his  own  career  in  the  same  stately,  pure  prose  in 


BIOGRAPHY.  ^^1 

which  he  narrates  the  ''Decline  and  Fall  of  Rome."  It 
must  have  needed  a  great  faith  in  a  man's  self  to  write 
those  sonorous  pages.  Two  passages  in  them  have  passed 
into  the  history  of  man.  One  is  that  in  which  he  describes 
how,  in  Rome,  on  the  15th  of  October,  1764,  as  he  sat  mus- 
ing amid  the  ruins  of  the  Capitol,  while  the  barefooted 
friars  were  singing  vespers  in  the  Temple  of  Jupiter,  the 
idea  of  writing  the  decline  and  fall  of  the  city  iirst  started 
in  his  mind.  The  other  is  the  passage  in  which  the  great 
historian  records  how,  on  the  night  of  the  27th  of  June, 
1787,  between  the  hours  of  eleven  and  twelve,  he  wrote 
the  last  lines  of  the  last  page  in  a  summer-house  at  Lau- 
sanne, and  how  then,  laying  down  his  pen,  he  ''  took  several 
turns  in  a  berceau,  or  covered  walk  of  acacias,  which  com- 
manded a  prospect  of  the  country,  the  lake,  and  the  moun- 
tains." The  story  is  aU  very  solemn  and  exalted.  It  is 
full  of  the  feeling  that  the  beginning  and  ending  of  a 
gi'eat  literary  work  is  as  great  an  achievement  as  the 
foundation  and  completion  of  an  empii'c — as  worthy  of 
record  and  of  honor ;  and  as  we  read  we  feel  so  too. 

A  greater  autobiography  than  Edward  Gibbon's  is  our 
own  Benjamin  Franklin's.  Franklin  had  exactly  the  ge- 
nius and  temperament  of  an  autobiographer.  He  loved 
and  admired  himself ;  but  he  was  so  bent  upon  analysis 
and  measurement  that  he  could  not  let  even  himself  pass 
without  discrimination.  The  style  is  like  Defoe.  Indeed, 
we  are  pleased  to  find  that  he  placed  great  value  both  on 
Defoe  and  Bunyan,  whose  stories  are  told  so  like  his  own. 
He  watches  his  own  life  as  he  watched  one  of  his  own 
philosophical  experiments.  He  flies  his  existence  as  he 
flew  his  kite,  and  he  tells  the  world  about  it  all  just  as  a 
thoughtful  boy  might  tell  his  mother  what  he  had  been 
doing — sure  of  her  kindly  interest  in  him.  The  world  is 
like  a  mother  to  Ben  Franklin  always :  so  domestic  and 


442  ESSAYS  AND  ADDEESSES. 

familiar  is  his  tboiiglit  of  her.  He  who  has  read  this 
book  has  always  afterward  the  boy-man  who  wi'ote  it  clear 
and  distinct  among  the  men  he  knows. 

Of  autobiographies  of  oiu*  own  time  there  are  three 
which  are  full  of  characteristic  life.  There  is  John  Stuart 
Mill's  life  of  himself,  so  wonderfully  cold  and  calm  and 
clear,  yet  with  the  warmth  of  subdued  possibilities  of  pas- 
sion always  burning  in  it — a  very  sea  of  glass,  mingled 
with  fire.  There  is  the  story  of  James  Nasmyth,  the  Scotch 
engineer  and  astronomer,  written  b}^  himself — the  happi- 
est life,  in  the  most  natural  and  simple  elements  of  hap- 
piness, I  tliink,  that  one  can  find.  And  I  miist  add,  al- 
though we  have  only  a  fragment  of  it  yet,  the  autobiog- 
raphy of  General  Grant,  the  soldier  who  hated  war ;  the 
American  who  had  the  spirit  of  the  institiitions  of  his 
country  filling  him ;  the  author  who,  without  literary  train- 
ing or  pretension,  or  almost,  one  may  say,  the  literary 
sense  at  all,  has  written  in  a  style  which  has  this  great 
quality,  that  it  is  like  a  simple,  brave,  true  man's  talk. 

Let  men  like  these  talk  to  you  and  tell  you  of  them- 
selves. Being  dead,  they  yet  can  speak.  How  good  it 
is  sometimes  to  leave  the  crowded  world,  which  is  so  hot 
about  its  trifles,  and  go  into  the  company  of  these  great 
souls  which  are  so  calm  about  the  most  momentous  things  ! 

Next  to  the  autobiography  comes  the  life  which  is  writ- 
ten by  some, one  who  is  of  near  kindred  or  of  close  asso- 
ciation with  the  man  of  whom  he  writes.  In  such  lives 
the  feeling  of  gratitude  and  personal  friendship  comes  in 
and  makes  an  atmosphere  which  takes  in  him  who  reads 
as  well  as  the  subject  and  the  author  of  the  book.  Of 
such  biographies  there  is  no  happier  or  more  fascinating- 
instance  than  the  "  Memoir  of  Professor  Agassiz,"  which 
Mrs.  Agassiz  gave  to  the  world  a  few  months  ago.  It  is 
the  picture  of  a  sweet,  strong  nature  turning  in  its  first 
young  simplicity  to  noble  things,  and  keeping  its  simplic- 


BIOGBAPRY.  443 

ity  through  a  long  life  by  its  perpetual  association  with 
them.  It  is  a  human  creature  loving  the  earth  almost  as 
we  can  imagine  that  a  beast  loves  it,  and  yet  at  the  same 
time  studying  it  like  a  wise  man.  The  sea  and  the  gla- 
cier teU  him  their  secrets.  In  his  very  dreams  the  extinct 
fishes  build  again  for  him  their  lost  construction.  There 
is  a  cool,  bright  freshness  in  every  page.  The  boy  of 
twenty-two  roUs  himseK  in  the  snow  for  joy.  The  man 
has  himself  let  down  a  hundred  and  twenty-five  feet  into 
the  cold,  blue,  wonderful  crevasse  to  see  how  the  ice  is 
made.  Finally,  the  New  World  tempts  him,  and  he  be- 
comes the  apostle  of  science  to  America.  All  this  is  told 
us  out  of  the  lips  which  have  the  best  right  to  tell  it. 

Take  another  biography.  I  do  not  know  whether  you 
boys  are  inchned  to  think  that  if  you  were  school-teachers 
you  would  want  to  have  one  of  yoiu-  scholars  write  your 
history.  There  is  a  common  notion  about  school  life — 
one  of  the  stupid  traditions  which  have  an  ounce  of  truth 
to  eleven  ounces  of  falsehood  in  them — that  school-teach- 
ers and  school-boys  are  natural  foes  and  cannot  understand 
each  other.  And  yet  Arthur  Stanley  wrote  the  life  of 
Dr.  Thomas  Arnold,  his  teacher  in  the  old  school  at  Rug- 
by, in  such  a  way  that  the  great  master's  fame  has  been 
set  like  a  jewel  firm  and  bright  in  the  record  of  the  nine- 
teenth century ;  and  school-teaching  owes  no  little  of  its 
new  dignity  and  attractiveness  to  that  delightful  book. 
It  has  added  a  name  to  history,  and  almost  a  new  sister 
to  the  family  of  the  high  arts. 

Suppose  that  you  could  have  the  privilege  of  sitting 
down  with  Mrs.Agassiz  and  hearing  her  tell  of  the  great 
naturalist  and  the  enthusiastic,  child-hearted,  lion-hearted 
man !  Suppose  that  you  could  walk  with  Dean  Stanley 
and  hear  him  tell  about  his  great  master,  to  whom  he 
owed  so  much  of  his  learning  and  his  character !  You 
can  do  both  these  things  if  you  will  read  these  books. 


444  ESS  ATS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

The  natui-e  of  the  men  they  write  of  will  come  through 
the  kindred  natures  and  the  warm  love  of  those  who  write 
about  them.  It  is  sunshine  poured  through  sunlight.  So 
the  story  of  William  Lloyd  Garrison,  told  by  his  children, 
has  a  certain  richness  about  it  which  comes  from  the  sym- 
pathy with  liis  work  which  was  fed  in  the  home  and  at 
the  very  table  of  the  great  emancipator  when  these  biog- 
raphers were  boys.  So  the  "  Life  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne," 
by  Julian  Hawthorne,  while  it  has  the  faults  has  also  much 
of  the  charm  which  belongs  to  a  son's  life  of  a  father — 
the  charm  of  ancestral  genius  reflected  through  an  heredi- 
tary genius  like  itself. 

Besides  these  two,  the  autobiography  and  the  friend's 
biogi"apliy,  there  remains  the  great  mass  of  biographies 
which  must  of  necessity  be  the  work  of  authors  far  re- 
moved from  the  subjects  about  whom  they  write,  perhaps 
of  quite  different  habits  and  associations.  The  biographer 
of  M.  Pasteur  calls  the  book  which  tells  his  story,  "  La 
Vie  (Viin  tSavant  par  uu  ignorant, "  and  as  we  read  we  easily 
see  that  there  is  some  advantage  for  us  in  the  fact  that 
the  author  who  writes  writes  from  the  outside,  and  is  not 
himself  a  proficient  in  the  knowledge  and  the  art  in  which 
the  great  French  naturalist  excels.  There  is  a  quiet  school- 
master at  Harrow  who  spends  his  placid  life  in  hearing 
school-boy  lessons  all  day  long,  who,  nevertheless,  has 
written  a  biography  of  a  soldier,  a  statesman,  a  ruler  of 
men — the  picturesque  and  heroic  Lord  LawTcnce,  ruler 
of  the  Punjaub  and  subduer  of  the  Indian  mutiny — which 
makes  that  terrible  time  live  again  and  all  its  awful  lessons 
burn  like  fire.  This  noble  and  most  interesting  book  of 
Bosworth  Smith  is  a  fine  instance  of  the  kind  of  biography 
whose  writer  is  neither  bound  hy  kindred  nor  identified 
by  similarity  of  occupation  with  his  hero.  This  author 
had  never  even  seen  the  far-off,  gorgeous  India  in  which 
his  drama  was  enacted,  nor  had  he  had  arivthing  to  do 


BIOGBAPRY.  445 

with  military  life.  Such  books  as  his  mean  something 
different  from  the  personal  interest  in  one's  own  life  from 
which  comes  the  autobiograpliy,  something  different  from 
the  desire  to  raise  a  monument  to  a  dear  friend,  or  to  per- 
petuate a  special  bit  of  history.  They  inean  that  large 
and  healthy  sense  which  feels  that  every  strong  human 
career  must  have  in  it,  whatever  its  particular  field  of 
action  may  have  been,  something  which  belongs  to  all 
humanity,  and  which  it  will  do  all  human  creatures  good 
to  know.  Such  a  book,  therefore,  is  a  token  of  the  liuman- 
ness  both  of  him  who  writes  it  and  of  him  about  whom 
it  is  written.  Take  another.  Take  Professor  Masson's 
"  Life  of  John  Milton."  He  who  wants  to  know  what  was 
done  in  England  dming  the  great  years  which  filled  the 
middle  of  the  seventeenth  century  may  read  that  book, 
and  one  might  almost  say  that  he  need  read  no  other,  so 
vitaUy  does  the  great  Puritan  poet  stand  in  the  center  of 
the  great  tumult  of  human  life,  and  so  vitally  does  the 
humanity  of  his  biogi*apher  feel  him  standing  there. 

Great  as  is  the  charm  which  other  writers  have,  this 
writer,  who  writes  solely  because  the  man  of  whom  he 
writes  seems  to  him  to  belong  to  all  mankind  and  to  have 
something  to  say  to  every  age,  must  always  have  a  charm 
deeper  than  any  other.  Great  is  he  who  in  some  special 
vocation,  as  a  soldier,  a  governor,  a  scientist,  does  good 
and  helpful  work  for  fellow-man.  Greater  still  is  he  who, 
doing  good  work  in  his  special  occupation,  carries  within 
his  devotion  to  it  a  human  nature  so  rich  and  true  that 
it  breaks  through  his  profession  and  claims  the  love 
and  honor  of  his  fellow-men,  simply  and  purely  as  a  man. 
His  is  the  life  which  some  true  human  eye  discerns,  and 
some  loving  and  grateful  hand  makes  the  subject  of  a 
pictui'e  to  which  all  men  enthusiastically  turn. 

I  cannot  help  fearing  that  in  my  evening's  talk  thus 
far  I  have  hastily  named  too  many  of  the  great  works  of 


446  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

biography  with  which  our  literature  is  filled,  and  so  have 
not  made  so  clear  as  I  should  wish  the  subject  of  biogra- 
phy in  general.  It  is  a  bad  fault  always  so  to  paint  the 
picture  that  men  cannot  see  the  forest  for  the  trees.  If, 
however,  I  have  tempted  any  of  my  young  hearers  to  read 
any  of  the  books  which  I  have  named,  my  fault  has  not 
been  wholly  faulty.  But  as  I  pass  on  to  say  a  few  words 
of  my  third  topic,  the  reader  of  biography,  let  me  speak 
more  generally. 

3.  First  of  all,  what  must  the  reader  bring  in  order  to 
get  the  real  life  out  of  the  biography  he  reads  ?  I  answer 
in  one  word,  a  true  life  of  his  own.  Reading  the  story  of 
a  man  whom  you  admire,  whose  character  is  bright  and 
splendid  before  you,  may  be  the  worst  thing  you  can  do, 
unless  you  meet  it  with  a  character  and  manhood  which 
turns  what  you  read  into  your  own  shape  and  appropriates 
this  other  man's  vitality  into  its  own.  The  object  of  read- 
ing biography,  it  cannot  be  too  earnestly  or  too  often 
said,  is  not  imitation,  but  inspiration.  Imitation  does  not 
require  life ;  inspiration  does.  For  imitation  you  need 
nothing  but  a  lump  of  clay  or  putty ;  for  inspiration  you 
must  have  a  pair  of  lungs.  When  will  aU  teachers  and  all 
scholars  learn  that  behind  all  acquirements  there  must  lie 
character  and  powers,  behind  all  learning  you  must  have 
life  ?  Before  you  can  get  mental  training  you  must  get 
a  mind ;  before  you  can  learn  to  live  well  you  must  learn 
to  live ;  before  one  can  become  something  one  must  be 
something.  "To  him  that  hath,"  so  Jesus  tells  us,  "to 
him  shall  be  given."  Therefore,  to  the  lives  of  other  men 
you  must  carry  a  true  life  of  your  own — convictions,  in- 
tentions, resolutions,  a  true  character.  Then  your  career 
will  not  be  swamped  by  theirs,  though  theirs  may  give  to 
yours  color  and  direction ;  then  they  will  make  you  wiser, 
stronger,  braver,  but  they  will  leave  you  still  yourself. 
Here  is  the  only  danger  which  I  know  in  the  reading  of 


BIOGRAPHY.  447 

biographies,  lest  he  who  reads  shall  lose  himself,  shall 
come  to  be  not  himself,  but  the  feeble  repetition  of  some 
other  mau.  It  is  the  danger  which  attends  all  friendship, 
all  personal  intercourse  of  man  with  man.  Your  own  re- 
sponsibilities, 3^our  own  chances,  your  own  thoughts,  your 
own  hopes,  your  own  reHgion,  which  are  different  from 
those  of  any  other  man  who  ever  lived,  those  you  must 
keep  sacred,  and  then  summon  the  inspiration  of  the  gi*eat- 
est  and  most  vital  men  whom  j'ou  can  find  to  touch  your 
life  with  their  fire,  and  make  you  not  what  they  are,  but 
more  thoroughly  and  energetically  yourself. 

And,  then,  bringing  and  keeping  this  life  of  his  own, 
what  sort  of  biographies  shall  any  special  young  man 
select  to  read  ?  Two  sorts,  I  answer :  those  of  men  most 
like  himself  in  character  and  vocation,  and  those  of  men 
who  are  most  unlike.  Let  him  read  the  first  sort  for  light 
and  intensity ;  let  him  read  the  second  for  sympathy  and 
breadth.  Here  is  a  young  naturalist.  Let  him  read  the 
life  of  Agassiz  of  which  I  spoke.  Wliat  preparation  can 
be  better  for  the  life  that  is  to  deal  immediate!}^  with 
nature  than  to  see  how  nature  filled  and  satisfied  a  very 
large,  rich  human  life ;  what  a  great,  fresh,  happy,  and 
hopeful  man  it  made ;  how  sacred  nature  was  to  him ! 
Such  a  life  well  read  must  rescue  the  pursuit  of  natural 
science  from  its  abstractness,  and  clothe  it  mth  human 
interest.  Before  I  undertake  any  work,  I  think  that  it 
will  do  me  good  to  meet  and  walk  through  the  pages  of 
his  biography  with  the  best  and  greatest  man  who  ever 
did  that  thing  before.  My  work,  when  I  go  forth  to  do 
it,  will  seem  at  once  more  real  and  more  ideal,  more  famil- 
iar and  more  exalted,  for  such  reading.  But  at  the  same 
time  my  young  naturalist  should  also  read  such  a  book 
as  Dr.  Holmes's  '■'■  Life  of  Emerson."  He  should  see  how 
full  of  strength  and  goodness  a  man  might  be  who  knew 
nothing  of  scientific  studies ;  he  should  learn  the  poetic 


448  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

and  pliilosopliic  values  of  the  stars,  and  the  mountains, 
and  the  iield ;  he  shoukl  provide  himself  with  humihty  by 
learning  the  dignity  and  worth  of  thought  and  knowledge, 
which  it  is  beyond  his  power  or  outside  of  his  range  to 
attain.  These  two  lives  together,  one  showing  him  the 
greatness  of  what  he  can  do,  the  other  showing  Inm  the 
greatness  of  what  he  cannot  do  ;  one  making  his  purpose 
more  intense,  the  other  making  his  sympathy  more  ex- 
tensive— both  of  them  he  should  read  with  reverence  and 
love. 

And  how  should  a  biography  be  read  ?  I  answer,  with 
as  little  of  the  literary  sense  as  possible.  A  biograph}^  is, 
indeed,  a  book ;  but  far  more  than  it  is  a  book  it  is  a  man. 
Insist  on  seeing  and  knowing  the  man  whom  it  enshrines. 
Never  lay  the  biography  down  until  the  man  is  a  living, 
breathiug,  acting  person  to  you.  Then  you  may  close, 
and  lose,  and  forget  the  book ;  the  man  is  3'ours  forever. 
It  is  a  poor  telescope  that  keeps  you  thinking  of  its  lens 
and  does  not  make  you  possess  the  star.  I  said  about  an 
hour  ago  that  the  great  Christian  book  was  a  biograph}'. 
The  Gospels  are  the  greatest  biography  that  was  ever 
written.  And  how  little  literary  feeling  there  is  about 
the  Gospels  !  How  we  hardly  think  about  them  as  a  book  ! 
How  it  is  the  blessed  Man  whom  we  see  through  their 
colorless  transparency  that  occupies  our  attention  and 
our  thoughts !  To  read  a  biography  must  be  to  see  a 
man — Johnson  or  Scott  or  Macaulay.  Boswell  or  Lock- 
hart  or  Trevelyan  must  only  be  the  friend  who  brings 
the  two,  you  and  Johnson  or  Macaulay  or  Scott,  together. 

I  think  that  the  reading  of  many  biographies  ought  to 
be  begun  in  the  middle.  It  seems  a  disorderly  suggestion, 
but  it  has  reason  in  it.  It  is  the  way  in  which  you  come 
to  know  a  man.  You  touch  his  life  at  some  point  in  its 
course ;  you  find  it  full  of  attractive  activity ;  you  grow 
interested  in  what  he  is  doing.     So  you  grow  interested 


BIOGRAPHY.  449 

in  liirn,  and  then,  not  till  then,  you  care  to  know  how  he 
came  to  be  what  yon  find  him — what  his  training  was : 
what  his  youth  was ;  who  his  parents  were,  perhaps  who 
his  ancestors  were,  and  who  was  the  first  man  of  his  name 
who  came  over  to  America,  and  where  that  progenitor's 
other  descendants  have  settled.  The  same  is  true,  I  think, 
of  a  biography.  Indeed,  I  have  often  wondered  whether 
a  biography  might  not  be  written  in  that  way.  Let  the 
''Life  of  General  Grant"  begin  with  the  story  of  Shiloh 
or  of  Vicksburg,  and  when  that  glowing  narrative  has 
thoroughly  interested  the  reader  in  the  great  soldier,  then 
let  us  hear  about  the  childhood  in  Ohio,  and  the  early  life 
at  West  Point,  and  St.  Louis,  and  Galena.  Probably  biog- 
raphers will  not  write  so  for  us ;  but  we  may  sometimes 
read  thus  the  biographies  which  they  have  written  in  the 
dull  order  of  chronology,  and  find  them  full  of  liveher 
and  deeper  interest. 

And  now  what  is  it  all  for  ?  I  must  not  talk  so  long  as 
I  have  talked  to-night,  about  a  certain  kind  of  literature, 
and  urge  you  to  give  it  a  high  place  in  your  reading,  with- 
out trying,  before  I  close,  to  gather  up  in  simple  statement 
the  good  results  which  have  come  to  many,  and  which 
will  come  to  you,  from  an  intelligent  reading  of  biography. 
I  mention  four  particulars. 

It  gives  reality  to  foreign  lands  and  distant  tunes. 
There  is  no  land  so  foreign  and  no  time  so  distant  that  a 
familiar  personality,  set  by  imagination  in  the  midst  of 
it,  wiU  not  make  it  familiar.  Some  friend  of  yours  goes 
to  live  in  Venice  or  Bombay,  and  how  immediately  your 
vision  of  that  remote  scene  brightens  into  vividness.  The 
place  belongs  to  you.  The  Grand  Canal  and  the  Caves  of 
Elephanta  are  real  things.  You  see  your  friend  floating 
on  the  "  tremulous  street,"  or  losing  himself  in  the  gloom 
of  the  solemn  cavern.  Or  you  are  able  to  pictiu'e  to  your- 
self how  this  other  friend  would  have  behaved  in  the  days 


450  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

of  Luther.  You  can  imagine  him  back  into  the  tumult 
of  the  Reformation.  And  straightway  the  Reformation 
days  are  here.  Luther  is  denouncing  Tetzel  in  your  study. 
Biography  does  the  same  thing  for  us,  only  better.  It 
takes  the  man  who  really  lived  in  Venice  or  Bombay  or 
Wittenberg  and  makes  him  real.  It  makes  him  live,  and 
straightway  all  his  time  and  place  live  with  him,  as  all 
the  heavens  spring  into  glory  when  the  sun  clothes  itself 
with  light.  With  each  man  who  becomes  a  living  being 
to  you,  a  whole  new  world  comes  into  being.  Each  new 
man  is  a  new  sun.  In  all  our  minds  thei'e  are  regions  of 
recognized  but  unrealized  space  and  time,  only  waiting 
for  us  to  set  a  real  living  human  life  into  the  midst  of 
them  to  make  them  open  into  reality  and  glow  with  life. 

Still  more  important  and  interesting  are  the  regions  of 
thought  which  are  unreal  to  me  until  some  man  stands  in 
the  midst  of  them  and  lights  them  up.  I  read  the  history 
of  metaphysics.  I  open  and  study  the  great  heavy  tomes. 
If  my  tastes  are  in  quite  other  directions  I  say,  "  How 
dull  this  whole  thing  is  !  How  vague  and  dreary  these 
abstractions  are  !  "  And  then  I  tm-n  and  read  the  life  of 
some  gi-eat  metaphysician,  and  how  everything  is  changed  ! 
I  do  not  understand  this  great  science  any  more  than  I 
did  before,  but  I  see  him  understand  it.  The  enthusiasm 
trembles  in  his  voice,  the  light  kindles  in  his  eye,  as  he 
talks  and  looks  upon  these  abstract  propositions  which 
appeared  to  me  so  dreary.  It  cannot  be  but  that  they 
catch  his  light.  The  whole  world  which  they  make  is 
real  to  me  through  his  reality.  My  universe  is  larger  by 
this  gi-eat  expanse.  So  one  world  after  another  kindles 
into  vi\ddness  when  I  see  its  human  inhabitant.  The 
world  of  music,  the  world  of  mathematics,  the  world  of 
politics,  the  world  of  charity,  the  world  of  religion,  each 
is  a  real  world  to  me  when  in  the  midst  of  it  stands  its 
real  man. 


BIOGRAPHY.  451 

Again,  think  what  must  be  the  effect  upon  personal 
character  of  the  reading-  of  a  great  biography.  If  it  is 
really  a  great  life  greatly  told,  like  Johnson's,  or  like 
Scott's,  two  convictions  grow  up  in  us  as  we  read :  first, 
this  man  was  vastly  greater  than  I  can  ever  be ;  and,  sec- 
ond, this  man,  great  as  he  is,  is  of  the  same  human  sort 
that  I  am  of,  and  so  I  may  attain  to  the  same  kind  of 
greatness  which  he  reached.  The  first  conviction  brings 
humility,  the  second  brings  encouragement.  And  humil- 
ity and  encouragement  together,  each  by  its  very  pres- 
ence saving  the  other  from  the  vices  to  which  it  is  most 
inclined,  these  are  the  elements  which  make  the  noblest 
character  and  the  happiest  life.  To  be  humble  because 
we  are  ourselves ;  to  be  courageous  because  we  are  part  of 
the  great  humanity,  and  because  all  that  any  man  in  any 
time  has  done  in  some  true  sense  belongs  to  us,  in  some 
true  sense  we  did  it ;  to  catch  the  two  certainties,  one  of 
the  identity  of  mankind  and  the  other  of  the  essential  and 
eternal  distinctness  of  every  man,  even  the  most  cheap 
and  insignificant ;  to  hold  these  two  convictions  in  their 
true  poise  and  proportion ;  to  let  them  make  for  us  one 
unity  of  character — this  is  a  large  part  of  the  secret  of 
good  living,  and  no  kind  of  book  helps  us  to  this  so  much 
as  a  good  biography. 

But  finally,  may  we  not  say  that  the  supreme  blessing 
of  biography  is  that  it  is  always  bathing  the  special  in 
the  universal,  and  so  renewing  its  vitality  and  freshness  ? 
Our  little  habits  grow  so  hard.  We  get  so  set  in  our  small 
ways  of  doing  things.  We  become  creatures  of  this  mo- 
ment of  time  on  which  we  happen  to  have  fallen.  The 
power  of  dull  fashion  and  routine  takes  possession  not 
merely  of  the  way  we  dress  and  talk,  but  of  the  way  we 
think.  Our  schools  have  their  cheap  little  standard,  and 
our  colleges  have  theirs,  and  our  professions  theirs,  and 
everv  duty  makes  more  of  the  wav  in  which  it  is  done  than 


^ 


452  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

of  the  divine  meaning  and  motive  of  doing  it  at  all ;  all 
gets  to  seem  parched  and  hardened  like  a  midsummer 
plain,  and  then  yon  take  up  your  great  biography,  and  as 
you  read  is  it  not  as  if  the  fountains  were  flung  open  and 
the  great  river  came  pouring  down  over  the  arid  desert  ? 
The  local  standard,  the  mere  arbitrary  fashion  of  the  mo- 
ment, disappears  in  the  great  richness  of  human  life; 
the  part  bathes  itself  in  the  whole ;  the  morbid  becomes 
healthy ;  the  peculiar  is  freed  from  any  haunting  affecta- 
tion, and  becomes  simply  that  individual  expression  of 
the  universal  which  every  true  man  must  be. 

Do  we  say  that  all  this  may  come  through  large  asso- 
ciation with  our  Hving  fellow-men  without  reading  about 
the  dead?  Much  of  it  may,  no  doubt,  come  so.  But  in 
some  respects  the  great  dead,  whose  faces  look  out  on  us 
through  their  biographies,  have  always  the  advantage; 
they  are  the  best  of  their  kind,  the  most  picturesque  illus- 
trations of  the  characters  they  bear ;  their  lives  upon  the 
earth  are  finished  and  complete.  They  will  not  change 
some  day  and  throw  into  confusion  the  lessons  which  we 
have  learned  from  them ;  and  since  they  belong  to  many 
lands  and  many  times  they  bring  us  a  sense  of  universal 
human  life  which  cannot  come  to  us  from  the  most  active 
contact  with  living  men,  who,  after  all,  must  represent 
very  much  the  same  conditions  to  which  we  ourselves  be- 
long. 

Therefore,  while  it  is  good  to  walk  among  the  living,  it 
is  good  also  to  live  with  the  wise,  great,  good  dead.  It 
keeps  out  of  life  the  dreadful  feeling  of  extemporaneous- 
ness,  with  its  conceit  and  its  despair.  It  makes  iis  always 
know  that  God  made  other  men  before  He  made  us.  It 
furnishes  a  constant  background  for  our  living.  It  pro- 
vides us  with  perpetual  humility  and  inspiration. 

There  are  some  of  the  great  old  paintings  in  which 
some  common  work  of  common  men  is  going  on,  some 


BIOGRAPHY.  453 

serious  but  most  familiar  action — the  meeting  of  two 
friends,  the  fighting  of  a  battle,  a  marriage  or  a  funeral 
— and  all  the  background  of  the  picture  is  a  mass  of  living 
faces,  dim,  misty,  evidently  with  a  veil  between  them  and 
the  life  we  live,  yet  evidently  there,  evidently  watching 
the  sad  or  happy  scene,  and  evidently  creating  an  atmo- 
sphere within  which  the  action  of  the  picture  goes  its 
way.  Like  such  a  picture  is  the  life  of  one  who  lives  in 
a  library  of  biographies,  and  feels  the  lives  which  have 
been,  always  pouring  in  their  spirit  and  example  on  the 
lives  which  have  succeeded  them  upon  the  earth. 

I  thank  you  for  your  kind  and  patient  attention,  and  if 
anything  which  I  have  said  has  been  of  interest  or  value 
to  you,  I  am  very  glad. 


LITERATURE  AND   LIFE. 

(Chautauqua  Assembly,  Framingliam,  Mass.,  July  21,  1886.) 

Ladies  and  Gentlejien  .-  It  certainly  would  not  be 
easy  to  point  out,  among  all  assemblages  of  scholars,  a 
more  interesting  sight  than  tliat  which  I  see  before  me 
now.  This  great  host  of  students  has  come  up  to  the 
annual  festival  full  of  the  delightful  recollections  and 
associations  of  a  year  of  study.  As  he  who  looked  into 
the  faces  of  the  Jews  who  thronged  the  temple  at  Jerusa- 
lem must  have  been  able  to  read  in  them  the  whole  story 
of  the  faith  and  inspiration  of  the  quiet  homes  on  the 
hillside  or  the  sea-shore  out  of  which  they  came,  so,  look- 
ing in  the  faces  of  my  audience  this  afternoon,  I  seem  to 
discern  the  pictures,  various  and  different,  yet  one  in  their 
common  ambition  and  struggle,  of  the  lives  which  have 
been  going  on  all  over  the  land  for  the  past  year.  I  see 
busy  households  where  the  daily  care  has  been  lightened 
and  inspired  by  the  few  moments  caught  every  day  for 
earnest  study.  I  see  chambers  which  a  single  open  book 
fills  with  light  like  a  burning  candle.  I  see  workshops 
where  the  toil  is  all  the  more  faithful  because  of  the  higher 
ambition  which  fills  the  toiler's  heart.  I  see  parents  and 
children  di-awn  close  to  one  another  in  theu'  common 
pursuit  of  the  same  truth,  their  common  delight  in  the 
same  ideas.  I  see  hearts  young  and  old  kindling  with 
deepened  insights  into  life,  and  broadening  with  enlarged 
outlooks  over  the  richness  of  history  and  the  beauty  of 
the  world.     Happy  fellowships  in  study,  self -conquests, 

454 


LITEliATUEE   AND   LIFE.  455 

self-discoveries,  brave  resolutions,  faithful  devotions  to 
ideals  and  hopes — all  these  I  see  as  I  look  abroad  upon 
this  multitude  of  faces  of  the  students  of  the  great  College 
of  Chautauqua. 

I  have  tried  in  these  opening  words  to  give  expression 
to  the  spirit  of  Chautauqua,  to  indicate  that  for  which 
Chautauqua  stands  in  the  minds  of  men  who  look  with 
cordial  interest  upon  this  great  new  spectacle  in  educa- 
tion. Its  spirit  is  more  important  than  its  methods.  Its 
methods  are  accidental:  its  purposes  and  its  spirit  are 
essential.  It  must  not  stand  in  your  minds  too  techni- 
cally, too  purely  as  a  thing  of  methods.  It  must  not  seem 
to  be  merely  an  ingenious  artifice,  a  skilfully  contrived 
arrangement  for  carrying  on  instruction  with  certain 
great  economies,  and  under  certain  unfavorable  condi- 
tions in  which  education  has  been  generally  thought  to 
be  difficult,  perhaps  impossible.  Chautauqua  must  mean 
more  than  that.  It  must  live  in  a  deeper  idea  and  a 
larger  purpose.  Not  b}^  ingenious  devices  and  arrange- 
ments, but  by  true  purposes  and  live  ideas,  do  all  institu- 
tions flourish  and  grow  strong.  To  find  the  true  natures 
of  things,  that  alone  is  to  understand  them,  and  to  be  able 
to  measure  their  power  of  living.  The  earth  nature  in 
the  earth,  the  sun  nature  in  the  sun— it  is  by  them  alone 
that  the  earth  pours  forth  its  harvests,  and  the  sun  sheds 
its  light. 

And  so,  when  I  was  honored  by  being  asked  to  speak  to 
the  students  of  Chautauqua  on  this  day  of  their  annual 
assemblage,  my  mind  turned,  not  to  the  special  methods 
of  this  most  interesting  institution,  but  to  its  spirit.  I 
asked  myself  what  it  represents,  what  it  means ;  and  the 
answer  to  that  question  fixed  the  subject  on  which  it 
seemed  right  for  me  to  speak.  Chautauqua  represents 
the  true  and  healthy  relationship  of  literatiu"e  and  life  to 
each  other.    Its  students  are  scholars  who  are  at  the  same 


456  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

time  men  and  women  deeply  involved  in  the  business  of 
living.  The  homes  in  which  they  dwell,  the  occupations 
in  which  their  daj^s  are  passed,  are  not  academical  and 
cloistered,  but  human  through  and  through,  and  open  to 
the  breezy  influences  of  the  world.  Learning  and  living 
are  in  closest  intercourse  and  friendship  with  each  other 
here.  What  subject  could  be  more  suited  to  an  anniver- 
sary Chautauqua  Day  tlian  an  attemj)t  to  estimate  the 
relationships  of  literature  and  life? 

That  literature  and  life  have  often  been  out  of  their 
true  and  healthy  relation,  nobody  can  doubt.  Literature 
has  often  become  technical  and  hard.  Its  purposes  have 
seemed  to  lie  outside  of  the  ordinary  purposes  for  which 
men  lived.  The  men  who  wrote  books  and  the  men  who 
read  books  have  seemed  to  make  a  little  world  all  by  them- 
selves. The  subjects  with  which  literature  was  to  deal 
have  been  arbitrarily  chosen  and  strictly  limited.  A  great 
part  of  the  live  activity  of  men  has  seemed  to  be  unsuited 
for  the  purposes  of  letters. 

On  the  other  hand,  life  has  often  been  contemptuous  of 
literature.  The  practical  man  has  boasted  that  he  never 
read  a  book.  The  reading  of  books,  when  it  was  under- 
taken, has  been  counted  an  amusement,  the  recreation  of 
an  idle  hour ;  something,  perhaps,  to  be  ashamed  of ;  cer- 
tainly something  which  belonged  to  a  region  of  existence 
distinct  from  the  shoeing  of  horses  or  the  selling  of  goods. 
Pedantry  on  the  one  side  and  drudgery  upon  the  other — 
these  have  been  the  result  of  the  unnatural  divorce  of  lit- 
eratm-e  and  life  wherever  it  has  taken  place.  The  stream 
of  activity  has  flowed  on  its  way  under  the  great  cliff  of 
learning,  and  only  felt  its  hardness  and  its  frown. 

Not  always  !  for  in  e\Qvy  time  the  truest  literature  has 
recognized  that  it  must  feed  itself  from  life,  and  the  most 
active  life  has  known  that  it  must  broaden  and  refine  itself 
by  literature ;  and  it  is  one  of  the  happy  tokens  of  the  real 


LITERATFEE  AND   LIFE.  457 

progress,  the  real  approach  to  natural  and  fundamental 
standards,  which  our  modern  days  are  making,  that  the 
unnatural  divorce  is  tolerated  less  and  less.  More  and 
more — this  Chautauqua  is  one  sign  of  it,  and  there  are 
many  others — more  and  more,  literature  and  hfe  are  lay- 
ing claim  to  one  another.  Literature  is  claiming  all  life 
for  its  material :  all  life  is  claiming  Hterature  for  its  in- 
spii'ation  and  its  food. 

A  book,  then — to  put  our  general  truth  at  once  into  its 
simplest  statement — stands  between  life  on  one  side  of  it, 
and  life  on  the  other  side  of  it — the  living  fact  or  truth 
which  it  records  on  one  side,  and  the  living  reader  on  the 
other  side — and  is  itself  the  lens  of  the  living  personality 
of  the  author,  which  brings  the  two  into  communication. 
You  see  how  life  is  everywhere  through  the  whole  process 
— in  the  star  which  shines,  in  the  telescope  which  trans- 
mits the  light,  and  in  the  eye  which  sees  the  l^eauty.  It 
matters  not  of  what  kind  the  book  may  be — a  novel  of 
George  Eliot,  an  essay  of  Macaulay,  a  history  of  Park- 
man,  a  poem  of  Browning,  a  play  of  Shakespeare,  a  treat- 
ise of  John  Stuart  Mill — it  is  perfectly  possible  so  to  con- 
ceive of  it,  so  to  speak  of  it,  that  everything  technically 
literary  disappears  from  our  thought  and  language,  and 
nothing  is  present  to  us  except  life,  beating  and  pulsing 
through  life,  to  find  its  effect  on  life  which  lies  upon  the 
other  side ;  the  life  of  what  has  happened  or  of  what  is 
intrinsically  true,  transmitted  through  the  live  intelligence 
of  some  man  or  woman  who  has  perceived  it,  to  tell  upon 
the  character  or  action  of  the  man  or  woman  who  stands 
waiting  for  its  effect  beyond. 

It  is  A^ery  interesting  to  see  how  in  the  simplest  read- 
ers all  the  technical  and  formal  part  of  the  conception  of 
literature  does  really  disappear,  and  oul}^  the  living  pro- 
cesses and  elements  remain.  When  Dickens  and  Thack- 
eray came  to  this  country  years  ago,  when  Matthew  Arnold 


458  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

and  Archdeacon  Farrar  came  the  other  day,  they  all  found 
themselves  greeted,  not  only  as  the  authors  of  books,  pro- 
fessional artists,  excelling  in  a  certain  art — that  welcome 
they  received  from  fellow-artists,  from  brother-authors, 
practised  in  the  same  technique,  and  from  readers  used  to 
criticism  and  analysis — but  out  of  city  w^orkshops  and 
country  cottages  came  hosts  of  readers  who  thought  of 
these  authors  as  living  friends  who  had  told  them  living 
things,  and  to  whom  they  looked  with  personal  intimacy 
and  gratitude  which  took  the  author  by  surprise.  So  men 
and  women  are  gathering  about  Dr.  Holmes  in  England 
now.  It  is  hard  for  those  to  whom  the  detail  of  book- 
making  is  familiar,  who  know  all  about  the  selection  of 
subjects,  and  the  laying  out  of  scales  of  treatment,  and 
the  choice  of  styles,  and  the  consulting  of  authorities,  and 
the  negotiating  with  publishers,  and  the  selection  of  types 
and  pages,  and  the  reading  of  proof,  and  the  putting  of  a 
book  upon  the  market — it  is  hard,  I  say,  for  those  who 
are  familiar  with  all  that,  to  realize  how  absolutely  unlit- 
erary  is  the  whole  conception  which  hosts  of  readers  have 
of  the  books  they  read.  We  talk  of  *' reading  Gibbon's 
'  Rome.' "  To  the  literary  man  that  means  the  study  of  a 
certain  style,  and  the  critical  observation  of  how  a  great 
writer  has  dealt  with  a  great  subject.  To  the  unliterary 
reader  it  means  the  pouring  of  all  the  wUd,  turbid,  f  ui'ious 
life  of  a  great  period  of  history  through  the  clear  channel 
of  a  great  intellect  upon  the  passions  and  delighted  or 
astounded  perceptions  of  a,  man  living  here  in  these  differ- 
ent days,  but  bearing  in  him  the  same  old  human  nature 
which  was  in  those  Romans  centuries  ago.  It  is  the  dif- 
ference between  Ruskin  looking  at  a  picture  of  Raphael, 
and  the  American  schoolboy  who  never  saw"  a  studio  or  a 
brush  gazing  at  the  same  immortal  canvas.  The  Hterary 
conception  does  not  banish  or  destroy  the  human  concep- 
tion, but  it  is  distinct  from  it.     And  when  the  literary 


LITERATURE  AND   LIFE.  459- 

conception  is  wholly  absent,  then  we  can  see  what  in  its 
simplest  meaning  a  book  is :  namely,  a  life  standing-  be- 
tween two  other  lives,  and  putting  them  into  association ; 
an  intellect  translating  a  truth  which  lies  behind  it  into 
character,  or  pleasure,  or  action,  in  the  man  who  stands 
before  it.  These  two  relations  each  book,  and  the  whole 
world  of  books  which  we  call  literature,  possess.  First 
they  receive  life  into  themselves,  and  then  they  give  out 
life  from  themselves  to  other  life. 

May  not  this  last  definition  furnish  me  with  the  natural 
division  and  arrangement  of  what  I  want  to  say?  Let 
me  speak  first  of  literature  as  the  effect  or  utterance  of  life, 
and  then,  secondly,  of  literature  as  the  food  of  life,  which 
will  come  very  near  to  speaking  first  of  the  author  and 
then  of  the  reader,  or  first  of  the  writing  and  then  of  the 
reading  of  books. 

Consider  first  the  priority  of  life.  Life  comes  before 
literature,  as  the  material  always  comes  before  the  work. 
The  hills  are  full  of  marble  before  the  world  blooms  with 
statues.  The  forests  are  full  of  trees  before  the  sea  is 
thick  with  ships.  So  the  world  abounds  in  life  before 
men  begin  to  reason  and  describe  and  analyze  and  sing, 
and  literature  is  born.  The  fact  and  the  action  must 
come  first.  This  is  true  in  every  kind  of  hteratm-e.  The 
mind  and  its  workings  are  before  the  metaphysician. 
Beauty  and  romance  antedate  the  poet.  The  nations  rise 
and  fall  before  the  historian  tells  their  stor}^  Nature's 
profusion  exists  before  the  first  scientific  book  is  written. 
Even  the  facts  of  mathematics  must  be  true  before  the 
first  diagram  is  drawn  for  their  demonstration. 

To  own  and  recognize  this  priority  of  life  is  the  first 
need  of  literature.  Literature  which  does  not  utter  a  life 
already  existent,  more  fundamental  than  itself,  is  shallow 
and  unreal.  I  had  a  schoolmate  who  at  the  age  of  twenty 
published  a  volume  of  poems  called ''  Life  Memories."     The 


460  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

book  died  before  it  was  born.  There  were  no  real  memo- 
ries, because  there  had  been  no  life.  So  every  science 
which  does  not  utter  investigated  fact,  every  history 
which  does  not  tell  of  experience,  every  poetry  which  is 
not  based  upon  tlie  truth  of  things,  has  no  real  life.  It 
does  not  perish :  it  is  never  born. 

Therefore  men  and  nations  must  live  before  they  can 
make  literature.  Boys  and  girls  do  not  write  books, 
Oregon  and  Van  Dieman's  Land  produce  no  literature : 
they  are  too  busy  living.  The  first  attempts  at  literature 
of  any  country,  as  of  our  own,  are  apt  to  be  unreal  and 
imitative  and  transitory,  because  life  has  not  yet  accu- 
mulated and  presented  itself  in  forms  which  recommend 
themselves  to  literature.  The  wars  must  come,  the  clam- 
orous problems  must  arise,  the  new  types  of  character 
must  be  evolved,  the  picturesque  social  complications  must 
develop,  a  life  must  come,  and  then  will  be  the  true  time 
for  a  literature. 

Very  impressive  and  mysteiious  and  beautiful  are  these 
noble  years  in  the  life  of  a  people  or  a  man,  which  are  so 
full  of  living  that  they  had  no  time  or  thought  for  writ- 
ing. Sometimes  when  we  think  of  the  vast  ages  which 
have  passed  thus,  and  left  no  record,  all  hterature,  all 
that  man  has  written  of  himself,  seems  to  be  only  like  the 
wave-beats  on  the  sea-shore  sand  compared  to  the  great 
tumultuous  ocean  beyond,  whose  million  surges  foam  and 
roll  and  break,  and  leave  no  record.  Literature  grows 
feeble  and  conceited  unless  it  ever  recognizes  the  priority 
and  superiority  of  life,  and  stands  in  genuine  awe  before 
the  greatness  of  the  men  and  of  the  ages  which  have 
simply  lived. 

And  yet  equally  true  with  this  necessity  of  living  first 
is  the  instinct  which  by  and  by,  in  its  true  time,  demands 
expression,  and  gives  birth  to  literature.  How  many  of 
us  can  remember  it  in  our  own  lives,  the  time  when  life 


LITEnATUBE  AND   LIFE.  461 

claimed  utterance,  and  clumsily,  shamefacedly,  secretly, 
but  with  a  dim  sense  of  crossing  a  line  and  entering-  a 
new  condition,  we  wrote  sometliing — a  poem,  an  essay,  a 
story — something  which  gave  literary  utterance  to  life ! 
It  is  a  common  enough  experience  with  active-minded 
children.  It  is  not  purely  imitative  and  unreal :  there  is 
a  native  hmnan  impulse  in  it.  The  result  is  not  valuable, 
but  the  act  is  significant  and  interesting.  Up  to  this  point 
of  private  literature,  as  we  may  call  it,  it  would  be  good 
if  everybody  came  at  least  once  in  his  Ufe.  The  prose  or 
verse  would  be  hke  the  papers  in  lost  pocketbooks,  "  of 
no  value  except  to  the  owner " ;  and  yet  it  would  be  of 
real  value  and  significance  to  him.  It  would  mark  a  stage 
in  his  existence,  a  distinct  entrance  on  a  special  and  new 
period  of  being. 

What  happens  thus  to  the  bright  boy  or  girl  happens 
also  to  the  growing  race,  has  happened  to  the  growing 
world.  Nay,  even  out  beyond  our  world,  in  the  mysteri- 
ous regions  of  essential  and  eternal  Being,  what  intima- 
tions and  suggestions  there  are  of  how  truly  the  necessity 
of  utterance  belongs  to  life  !  Think  of  those  deep  words 
of  the  Book  of  Genesis :  "  God  said.  Let  there  be  light : 
and  there  was  light."  Think  of  the  great  beginning  of 
the  Gospel  of  St.  John :  ''The  Word  was  with  God,  and 
the  Word  was  God ;  and  tlie  Word  was  made  flesh,  and 
dwelt  among  us."  It  is  the  depth  of  life  becoming  speech, 
making  itself  audible  in  word.  God  is,  and  God  speaks 
— existence  and  revelation.  "  I  am,"  and  "  Hear,  O  Israel " 
— those  two  are  inseparable.  "I  make  light  and  create 
darkness,"  that  comes  first ;  and  then  ''  Day  unto  day  utter- 
eth  speech,  niglit  unto  night  showeth  knowledge."  Surely 
there  are  the  two  facts,  being  and  utterance,  which  in  our 
human  world  appear  as  life  and  literature ;  both  sacred, 
and  in  deepest  and  most  necessary  union  with  each  other. 

Who  can  tell  what  a  barbarism  would  settle  on  the 


462  ESSAYS  JXD   JDDBESSES. 

world  if  this  imj)ulse  of  utterance  were  not  always  pres- 
ent? For  utterance  is  registration  and  declared  attain- 
ment. Any  achievement  of  man  embodied  in  literary 
expression  becomes  in  large  degree  fixed  and  settled,  and 
is  a  point  of  departure  for  new  achievements.  Without 
such  registration  and  fixity  by  utterance,  each  new  gen- 
eration must  begin  at  the  bottom  of  the  hill,  and  climb 
the  whole  long  height  anew.  A  great  literary  work  is  a 
Grands  Mulcts,  where  the  traveler  stays  over-night,  and 
assures  himself  of  what  he  has  already  done,  and  is  ready 
for  a  new  start  toward  the  summit  in  the  morning.  It  is 
not  possible,  indeed,  that  any  utterance  should  do  this 
absolutely,  or  that  each  new  generation  should  in  any  way 
be  reheved  of  the  necessity  of  going  back  to  the  begin- 
ning, and  solving  over  again  for  itself  the  most  funda- 
mental of  the  everlasting  problems.  Some  things,  the 
deepest  things,  each  race,  each  man,  must  do  from  the 
very  outset,  almost  as  if  no  race  or  man  had  lived  and 
struggled  at  the  task  before.  But  there  are  other  achieve- 
ments— the  great  discoveries  in  nature  or  in  art,  the  great 
practical  experiments  in  living — which,  once  attained  and 
thoroughly  expressed  in  literature,  make,  as  it  were,  a  new 
and  higher  plane  of  living,  on  which  the  next  generation 
takes  its  stand,  and  from  which  it  sets  out  toward  the 
higher  heights  which  remain  for  it  to  climb.  Was  it  not 
a  different  thing  for  a  Greek  that  he  lived  after  Plato,  in- 
stead of  before  ?  Is  it  not  a  new  England  for  a  child  to 
be  born  in  since  Shakespeare  gathered  up  the  centuries 
and  told  the  stor;^'  of  humanity  up  to  his  time  ?  WiU  not 
Carlyle  and  Tennyson  make  the  man  who  begins  to  live 
from  them  the  "  heir  of  aU  the  ages  "  which  have  distilled 
their  riclmess  into  the  books  of  the  sage  and  the  singer 
of  the  nineteenth  century  ? 

I  do  not  mean,  of  course,  merely  that  the  literature  of 
any  time  records  specifically  the  facts  which  have  been 


LITERATURE   AND   LIFE.  463 

discovered,  or  the  truths  which  have  been  learned,  up  to 
his  time,  so  that  thej'  do  not  have  to  be  discovered  or 
learned  again.  It  is  something  more  general,  more  spirit- 
ual than  that.  The  literature  of  any  time,  taken  as  a 
whole,  declares  what  man  in  that  time  has  come  to  be — 
the  quality  of  his  existence,  the  sort  of  ci-eature  he  is,  the 
degree  of  his  development.  Then,  as  that  creature,  in 
that  development,  he  starts  forth  on  the  next  stage  of  his 
long  joui'ney.  The  literature  is  the  node  or  focus  into 
which  life  gathers  itself,  that  it  may  open  itself  thence 
into  new  life.  It  is  a  judgment-day  between  two  worlds. 
It  is  like  the  hour  of  meditation  in  which  thoughtful  souls 
indulge  at  twilight,  or  on  a  New  Year's  eve,  when  an  old 
year  lies  a-dying,  in  which  they  gather  themselves  into 
self-consciousness,  and  feel  themselves  full  of  mysterious 
prophecy  of  what  they  are  to  be. 

This  is  the  way  in  which  literature  stands  between  liv- 
ing and  living.  Life  utters  itself  in  literature,  and  then, 
in  its  turn,  literature  produces  itself  in  life.  Once  more, 
life,  and  not  literature,  is  the  essential  thing.  It  is  Alpha 
and  Omega,  the  beginning  and  the  end,  the  first  and  the 
last.  All  else,  from  Beta  to  Psi,  comes  in  the  interval 
between.  A  man,  and  not  a  book,  is  the  piu-pose  of  the 
world.  No  wonder  that  many  literary  men,  who  have 
been  also  truly  living  men,  have  felt  this  to  a  degree 
which  has  abnost  made  them  despise  their  high  vocation. 
"  Life,"  Carlyle  used  to  say,  "  is  action,  not  talk.  The 
speech,  the  book,  the  review  or  newspaper  article,  is  so 
much  force  expended — force  lost  to  practical  usefulness." 
He  said  once  that  England  produced  her  greatest  men 
before  she  had  any  literature  at  aU.  "If  I  had  been 
taught  to  do  the  simplest  useful  thing,"  he  said,  "  I  should 
have  been  a  better  and  happier  man."  Somewhat  in  the 
same  strain  writes  Emerson.  "  Much  of  our  reading,"  he 
declares,  ''is  a  pusillanimous  desertion  of  our  work  to 


464  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDRESSES. 

gaze  after  our  neighbors."  BjTon  says  of  Jack  Bunting, 
"  He  knew  not  wliat  to  say,  and  so  he  swore."  I  may  say 
it  of  our  preposterous  use  of  books :  "  He  knew  not  what 
to  do,  and  so  lie  read."  Who  cannot  understand  this  im- 
patience of  the  hterary  man  with  hterature  ?  Wlio  does 
not  feel  that  it  is  healthy  and  human?  Who  does  not 
believe  that  the  literary  man  who  feels  it  healthily,  and 
not  morbidly,  does  his  literary  work  the  better  for  it? 
For  it  is  a  witness  that  he  has  rightly  apprehended  the 
relation  of  literature  to  life,  the  essential  superiority  of 
life  to  literature. 

And  }'et  we  know  that  we  have  not  given  the  full  ac- 
count of  literature  when  we  have  declared  it  to  be  the 
record  and  utterance  of  life.  It  is  far  more  than  that. 
What  happens  to  life  when  it  passes  into  literature  is 
something  very  rich  and  subtle.  It  keeps  its  quality  as 
life,  but  it  gains  other  qualities,  which  result  from  its 
passage  through  the  intelligence  of  man,  and  from  its 
expression  in  that  form  of  utterance  which  we  caU  style. 
Truth  uttered  in  prose  or  verse  becomes  a  new  thing,  with 
new  powers ;  a  distinct  addition  to  the  beings  and  the 
forces  which  are  in  the  world ;  and  so  something  more 
than  an  extension  and  perpetuation  of  the  truth  as  it  ex- 
isted before  it  entered  into  literature.  Do  you  see  what 
I  mean  ?  Is  Hamlet  the  play  nothing  more  than  a  mere 
record  of  Hamlet  the  man  and  his  history  ?  Is  there  not 
in  the  wonderful  tragedy  a  quality  and  preciousness  of 
its  own,  distinct  from  that  which  belonged  to  the  life,  be- 
cause of  a  different  sort  from  that  which  lives  possess,  of 
a  sort  which  only  comes  from  the  combination  of  lives 
first  with  the  subtle  intelligence  of  observing  man,  and 
then  with  the  expressive  medium  of  style?  The  great 
drama  of  the  French  Eevolution  fights  itself  out  in  tumul- 
tuous Paris,  and  stands  thenceforth  forever  an  imperish- 
able fact  in  the  history  of  man.     Years  afterward  Thomas 


LITERATUBE  AXD   LIFE.  465 

Carlyle,  iu  England,  writes  the  story  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution, and  liis  finished  work  is  another  fact,  distinct,  vrith 
quality  of  its  owm ;  another  achievement,  which  also  can- 
not perish,  hut  stands  forever  in  its  own  region  of  interest 
and  greatness.  '•  Carlyle's  '  French  Eevolution,' "  we  say, 
almost  as  if  we  woidd  indicate  in  the  very  phrase  that 
there  is  a  French  Revoliition  which  belongs  to  him,  which 
exists  in  the  world  in  ^■irtue  of  his  genius.  It  is  not  sim- 
ply that  his  genius  has  shone  upon  an  historic  fact,  as 
the  sun  shines  upon  a  stone,  and  makes  manifest  what 
was  always  in  the  stone  before,  adding  absolutely  noth- 
ing new.  The  historic  fact  and  the  author's  genius  have 
mingled,  as  the  seed  and  sunshine  mingle,  and  this  flower 
of  literatui'e  is  the  result. 

This  is  easiest  to  see,  perhaps,  in  works  of  the  kind  of 
these  of  which  I  have  been  speaking,  in  which  the  histor- 
ical element  is  very  large — works  of  history  or  biography. 
But  it  is  true  of  all  books  which  really  have  authors,  and 
so  really  belong  to  literatui-e.  A  fact  of  nature  is  one 
thing ;  a  book  of  science  is  another.  A  faculty  in  human 
nature  has  its  wonder,  its  mystei-j',  its  beauty ;  the  por- 
trayal of  that  faculty,  its  analysis,  its  coordination  with 
other  faculties,  in  a  book  of  Pascal  or  John  Stuart  31111, 
possesses  a  different  value  of  a  different  sort.  "  Speaking 
the  truth  in  love,"  St.  Paul  says.  See  what  three  elements 
go  to  make  up  the  total  achievement  which  that  phrase 
describes — truth,  and  love,  and  speech ;  a  fact  lying  back 
of  all,  a  personal  disposition  in  which  that  fact  is  con- 
ceived, and  a  form  of  utterance — all  these  together.  Truth 
bathed  in  love,  and  uttered  in  speech,  makes  the  new  unit 
of  power,  which  is  literature. 

It  is  quite  necessary  that  we  should  acknowledge  this 
peculiar  value  of  literature.  If  we  do  not,  it  loses  its  dig- 
nity, and  becomes  mere  reporting,  whose  sole  virtue  is  its 
accuracy.     I  have  great  respect  for  the  reporter  ■  it  be- 


•166  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

comes  US  all  to  respect  liim,  for  we  are  all  helpless  in  his 
niighty  hands.  Bnt  rightfully  as  he  claims  our  respect, 
I  do  not  suppose  that  he  thinks  of  himself  as  an  author, 
or  calls  the  result  of  his  labors  literature.  The  qualities 
which  separate  the  author  from  the  stenographer,  and 
make  the  superiority  of  literature  to  reportership,  are  two 
— one  metaphysical  and  the  other  artistic.  They  are  ideal- 
ity and  order,  the  development  of  ideas  and  the  arrange- 
ment of  parts — the  same  qualities  which  in  art  separate  a 
true  portrait  from  a  photograph.  A  poi'trait  has  a  value 
of  its  own,  entirely  independent  of  its  likeness  to  the  man 
who  sat  for  it ;  a  photograph  has  none.  So  literature  is 
known  to  be  true  literature  by  its  possession  of  a  value  in 
itself,  a  value  of  thought  and  style,  distinct  from  that  first 
and  highest  value  which  belongs  to  it  as  an  expression  of 
life.  This  last  it  must  have,  or  it  is  worthless.  Those 
others  it  must  also  have,  or,  whatever  worth  it  may  pos- 
sess, it  is  not  literature. 

It  is  evident,  I  think,  from  what  I  have  been  saying, 
that  the  relations  between  life  and  the  literature  in  which 
it  finds  its  expression  are  very  delicate,  and  their  propor- 
tions to  each  other  ma}^  be  disturbed  in  various  ways. 
Life  may  become  too  strong  for  literature.  There  is  ques- 
tion whether  it  be  not  so  to-day.  The  world  is  intensely 
and  vehemently  alive.  New  forms  of  human  activity  are 
at  work  on  every  side.  Energy  is  bursting  out  in  unex- 
pected places ;  calm  questions  are  becoming  violent ;  prob- 
lems which  men  used  to  think  easy  are  showing  themselves 
to  be  all  feverish  with  difficulty.  It  may  well  prove  at 
such  a  time  that  the  literary  methods  and  standards  which 
have  been  heretofore  developed  are  not  sufficient  for  their 
task ;  and  until  expression  expands  itself,  and  becomes 
more  fit  for  its  new  duty,  that  which  is  waiting  to  be 
expressed  may  very  possibly  suffer  from  the  inarticulate 
condition  in  which  it  is  compelled  to  remain.    Is  it  not  so 


LITEBATVUE  AND   LIFE.  4G7 

to-day?  Who  doubts,  that,  if  the  social  perplexities  of 
the  time  could  be  set  forth  iu  a  more  competent  and  suffi- 
cient literature ;  if  the  poem,  the  novel,  the  treatise,  were 
more  able  than  they  have  yet  shown  themselves  to  analyze 
and  interpret  the  tumult  of  argument  and  passion  which 
is  filling'  the  actual  life  of  man,  to  catch  its  true  meaning, 
and  expound  it  with  clearness — the  pent-up  torrent  would 
find  easier  vent,  and  prejudice  would  sweep  away,  and 
open  into  broader,  juster,  and  more  charitable  thought  ? 
At  such  a  time  literature  must  enlarge  its  methods ;  it 
must  break  the  slavery  of  old  standards ;  it  must  learn  to 
let  new  forms  shape  themselves  freely  from  the  pressure 
of  spiritual  life ;  it  must  beheve  in  the  future  even  more 
than  it  reverences  the  past. 

"We  can  see  signs  enough  of  such  pressure  of  hfe  on  lit- 
erature. We  see  it  in  the  very  fact  that  the  other  danger 
is  hardly  a  thing  to  fear  to-day.  That  other  danger  is, 
that  literature  should  be  too  strong  for  life.  That  comes 
in  times  when  the  spirit  of  life  is  feeble,  when  the  energy 
of  man  seems  for  the  time  exhausted,  and  merely  to  tell 
of  what  has  been  and  what  is  appears  the  easy  task  of 
men  of  letters.  Then  comes  a  dilettante  age.  Then  men 
play  ^vith  books,  and  make  arbitraiy,  fantastic,  artificial 
canons  of  literary  style.  Such  times  come  in  the  luUs 
which  follow  great  convulsions;  in  the  reactions  after 
mighty  energies,  when  men  seem  weary  of  action,  as  the 
water  just  below  Niagara  pauses  after  its  tremendous 
plunge,  and  idly  eddies  to  and  fro  before  it  starts  with 
a  new  impetuosity  toward  the  rapids.  The  end  of  the 
seventeenth  century  and  the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth 
made  such  a  period.  Such  a  pei-iod  may  very  possibly 
follow  the  vehement  vitalit}^  of  our  time.  But  oiu*  time 
is  not  such  a  period.  Now  life  is  pressing  upon  litera- 
ture. Men's  hearts  are  feeling  and  dreaming  and  discern- 
ing more  than  the  poets  know  how  to  sing.     Society  is 


468  ESSAYS  AND   ADD  BESSES. 

trembling  with  incipient  convulsions,  of  which  no  analysis 
can  give  a  competent  account.  Science  is  finding  more 
truth  than  onr  systems,  philosophical  or  religious,  can 
easily  digest.     Life  is  too  strong  for  literature. 

We  discern  the  signs  of  such  a  state  of  things  in  many 
places.  We  see  it  in  the  readiness  with  which  bright 
and  earnest  men  devise  new  forms  of  utterance,  essen- 
tially literary,  yet  free  from  much  of  the  formality  of  old 
literary  methods,  for  the  outpouring  of  their  tumultuous 
ideas,  as  in  all  the  multifarious  systems  of  magazines  and 
periodicals  and  journals.  We  see  it  in  the  vagueness  of 
the  whole  impressionist  school  of  fiction  and  of  poetry, 
which  tries  to  do  with  a  few  broad  sweeps  of  the  brush 
what  it  despairs  of  working  out  in  clear,  minute,  intelli- 
gent detail.  We  see  it  in  the  frequent  palsy  of  high  en- 
deavor. Can  anything  more  show  the  sense  of  incompe- 
tency for  its  time  than  that  the  most  skilful  novel  should 
give  up  the  great  life  of  men,  and  go  to  depicting  police- 
courts  and  boarding-houses  ?  We  see  it  in  the  very  mul- 
titude and  variety  of  books,  as  when  the  torrent  which 
found  no  one  outlet  sufficient  for  its  flow,  bursts  through 
every  possible  chink,  and  spends  a  little  of  its  pent-up 
fury  in  a  thousand  wayward  spirts  and  jets. 

"  Goethe,"  says  Frederick  Maurice,  "was  entirely  a  pro- 
testant  against  the  bookishness  of  Germany  in  behalf  of 
life."  The  whole  pressure  of  literature  on  life  of  which  I 
have  been  speaknig  began  contemporaneously  with  Goethe. 
Its  great  voice  has  been,  like  his,  a  protest  against  book- 
ishness. To  write  a  book  was  once  a  serious  and  awful 
action.  A  book  was  a  sacred  thing.  A  true  book  is  sa- 
cred still,  but  it  is  a  healthier  sacredness  which  it  pos- 
sesses :  it  is  the  sacredness  of  religion,  not  of  superstition ; 
it  is  the  sacredness  of  the  sunny  cornfield,  and  not  of  the 
sunless  Druid  grove ;  it  is  the  sacredness  of  purpose,  and 
not  of  initiated  execution. 


LITERATURE  AND   LIFE.  469, 

The  multitude  of  books  dismays  us.  I  look  around  on 
this  assemblage,  and  I  dare  say  I  am  speaking  to  a  hun- 
di'ed  authors.  In  such  an  assemblage  I  should  once  have 
spoken  to  not  two.  It  is  easj'^  to  be  disheartened  and 
cynical  at  this ;  it  is  easy  to  turn  it  into  ridicule.  To  me 
it  seems  to  give  ground  for  neither  of  those  dispositions, 
I  rejoice  in  the  multitude  of  books.  What  though  three 
quarters  of  them  die  as  soon  as  they  are  born,  and  only 
one  in  a  million  has  a  voice  that  the  world  hears  ?  Is  it 
not  so  with  trees  ?  Is  it  not  so  with  men  ?  It  is  "  a  pro- 
test against  bookishness  in  behalf  of  life,"  this  multitude 
of  books.  It  is  a  declaration  that,  while  life  will  always 
seek  for  itself  the  special  value  which  belongs  to  literary 
expression,  it  wiR  not  so  stand  in  awe  of  the  dignity  of 
literature  as  to  wait  till  it  can  conform  itself  to  classical 
standards  and  conventional  rules,  but  will  break  out  with 
v/hat  voice  it  can  command,  whether  it  be  the  deep  bass 
of  a  theological  treatise,  or  the  piping  treble  of  a  social 
pamphlet,  to  tell  the  world  what  is  on  its  soul. 

Of  course,  literature  will  be  demoralized  in  the  process 
of  its  enlargement  and  multiplication ;  but  it  will  be  the 
demoralization  of  the  arni}^  when  it  breaks  its  camp  and 
goes  out  to  the  battle.  Of  course,  a  vast  amount  of  futil- 
ity and  idiocy  and  blasphemy  wiU  pour  itself  out  in  print. 
In  the  long  run  the  world  will  take  care  of  that.  The 
public  taste,  the  pubhc  conscience,  the  public  busyness, 
and  the  printer's  bill — we  must  trust  to  them  for  win- 
nowers. In  spite  of  them  we  must  expect  to  see  empt}^ 
charlatans,  blown  full  of  wind,  standing  like  bronze  statues 
on  their  pedestals.  But  in  spite  of  them,  too,  the  time 
will  never  come  in  which  the  world  will  not,  once  a  month, 
know  what  voice,  speaking  to  it  earnest^  and  seriously, 
has  something  to  say  which  it  will  do  well  to  hear,  and 
once  or  twice  a  century  will  not  recognize  that  another 
great  singer  or  great  teacher  has  been  sent  of  God  to  join 
the  slowly  growing  chorus  of  immortals. 


470  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

Therefore,  fellow-students  of  Cliantauqua,  write  your 
book  fearlessly,  if  you  have  a  book  to  "vvrite.  Let  no  liter- 
ary conceit  scare  you  with  its  sneer,  sajdiig,  ''What!  will 
you,  too,  be  author?"  Answer  him  boldly,  ''Yes,  I  will." 
Only  be  sure  that  your  calling  to  be  an  author  is  a  true 
calling;  and  then  answer  it,  whoever  sneers.  Only  be 
sure  that  it  is  real  life  seeking  for  genuine  utterance  ;  and 
then  say  your  word  simply,  strongly,  serenel}',  without 
affectation  and  without  fear.  The  world  may  not  listen : 
you  must  none  the  less  be  glad  to  have  spoken.  Who  can 
tell  beforehand  to  whom  the  world  will  listen  ?  Who  can 
tell,  even  afterward,  what  good  it  may  have  done  the 
speaker  to  have  spoken,  even  to  an  unlistening  world  ? 

This  much  I  say  of  literature  as  the  effect  of  life.  I 
hope  that  I  have  made  it  clear  how  natural  and  essential 
is  the  first  relationship  between  the  two.  Literature  is 
not  an  artificial  habit ;  certainly  it  is  not  a  corrupt  crust 
upon  the  surface  of  life :  it  is  the  true  utterance  of  life ; 
it  is  indeed  a  part  of  life,  necessary  for  life's  full  complete- 
ness ;  it  is  the  expression  of  life's  heart  and  soul. 

And  now  let  us  pass  on,  in  what  time  we  may  still  ven- 
ture to  consume,  to  speak  of  the  other  side  of  our  subject 
— literature  as  the  food  of  life.  Life  first  produces  litera- 
ture, then  literature  in  its  turn  produces  life.  The  first 
part  of  our  subject  has  led  us  to  speak  of  book-wi'iters 
and  book- writing :  this  second  part  leads  us  to  speak  of 
book-readers  and  book-reading.  Perhaps  this  second  part 
will  come  nearer  to  the  interests  of  my  hearers  than  the 
first ;  for  we  are  all  readers  of  books,  while  not  all,  not 
quite  all,  of  us  write  them. 

Literature,  then,  let  us  begin  by  saying,  finds  its  way 
into  life  through  three  great  doors,  which  we  may  call  the 
door  of  curiosity,  the  door  of  obedience,  and  the  door  of 
admiration ;  or,  to  put  it  less  figuratively,  every  book  pre- 
sents itself  to  its  student  either  as  a  body  of  knowledge 
which  he  may  believe,  or  as  a  law  which  he  may  obey,  or 


LITERATURE  AXD   LIFE.  471 

as  an  inspiration  and  an  influence  which  may  tell  upon 
his  spiritual  nature.  You  cannot  picture  to  yourself  any 
other  kind  of  approach  and  offer  which  a  book  can  make 
to  him  who  takes  it  up  to  read  it.  From  the  most  ponder- 
ous treatise  of  theology  down  to  the  lightest  novel  which 
comes  skipping  from  the  press,  every  book  comes  bring- 
ing one  or  other  of  these  three  appeals.  One  book  comes, 
saying,  "  Believe  this,  for  it  is  true ;  "  another,  "  Do  this, 
for  it  is  right ;  "  another,  "  Become  this,  for  it  is  good." 
The  book  which  seems  the  lightest,  the  book  of  mere 
amusement,  still  takes  its  place,  whether  it  will  or  no,  in 
one  or  other  of  these  classes ;  and,  when  its  easy  pages 
close,  leaves,  though  too  light  for  the  reader's  self-con- 
sciousness to  recognize  it,  some  idea  for  the  mind,  or  some 
rule  for  the  conduct,  or  some  impress  on  the  character, 
which  is  its  legitimate  and  permanent  result  upon  its 
reader. 

It  must  be  so,  because  these,  and  these  only,  are  the 
open  capacities  of  man.  These  are  the  doors  through 
which  all  things  come  into  his  life.  Take  away  man's 
power  of  believing  that  which  he  is  taught,  and  of  obey- 
ing that  which  he  is  commanded,  and  of  loving  and  ap- 
propriating that  which  he  admires,  and  he  remains  noth- 
ing but  a  great,  high  fortress  of  unbroken  wall,  without  a 
gateway  through  which  any  visitor  from  the  rich  world 
outside  himself  can  come  in  to  bring  him  of  its  richness. 
The  gateways  through  which  all  his  gains  come  to  him 
are  these  three — curiosity,  and  obedience,  and  admiration ; 
the  power  of  the  disposition  to  learn  truth,  and  to  accept 
authority,  and  to  feel  influence. 

I  hesitate,  as  you  see,  just  what  name  to  write  over  the 
third  of  man's  great  gateways.  It  is  not  so  easy  to  give 
a  name  to  as  the  others.  They  are  very  simple:  this 
third  is  very  subtle  and  elaborate.  I  mean  by  it  that 
whole  mysterious  power  which   belongs  to  man  to  be 


472-  ESSAYS  jxn  addbesses. 

changed  in  liis  character  by  direct  contact  with  some 
nature  wliich  he  loves — or  which  he  hateSj  for  hate  is  only 
love  turned  backward — even  without  the  communication 
of  truth  to  his  understanding,  or  of  commandment  to  his 
will.  You  see  how  elaborate  the  definition  grows;  but 
the  gate  stands  more  or  less  open  in  the  hfe  of  every 
human  being,  from  the  baby  to  the  sage. 

Every  book  and  every  literary  man,  then,  comes  before 
the  world  in  one  or  other  of  these  three  aspects — either 
as  dogmatist,  or  as  moralist,  or  as  what,  for  want  of  a 
better  name,  we  may  call  mystic.  The  same  writer,  in- 
deed, may  combine  more  than  one  of  these  characters.  A 
gi'eat  book  may  unite  all  three.  This  is  the  glory  of  the 
Bible.  It  is  at  once  the  book  of  truth,  the  book  of  law, 
and  the  book  of  influence.  Think  of  it  as  the  book  of 
truth,  and  yoii  remember  immediately  the  great  historical 
pictures  of  the  Old  Testament,  and  the  gi-eat  appeals  to 
reason  in  the  Epistles  of  the  New.  Think  of  it  as  the 
book  of  law,  and  you  hear  the  thunder  of  the  Ten  Com- 
mandments, and  the  vehement  admonitions  of  the  Hebrew 
prophets.  Think  of  it  as  the  book  of  influence,  and  you 
feel  the  pathetic  power  of  the  Psalms  of  David  and  the 
Gospel  of  St.  John.  Try  to  conceive  its  full  might  as  a 
combination  of  the  three,  and  there  stands  out  before  you 
the  personality  of  Him  of  whom  the  whole  Bible  is  but 
the  picture  and  expression — that  Christ  who  is  at  once 
the  teacher  of  man's  ignorance,  the  ruler  of  man's  way- 
wardness, and  the  inspirer  of  man's  spiritual  vitality ;  at 
once  the  Truth  and  the  Way  and  the  Life.  It  is  in  its 
combination  and  mastery  of  all  three  of  these  great  funda- 
mental powers  that  the  Bible  is  the  universal  and  eternal 
book,  the  Word  of  God  to  man. 

Christian  literature  lias  divided  into  departments  and 
shared  among  her  many  wi-iters  that  whole  which  the  great 
Christian  book  comprehends  in  its  totality.     She  has  had 


LITERATURE  AXD  LIFE.  473 

her  dogmatists,  her  moralists,  and  her  spiritual  leaders, 
her  inspirers  of  character.  Truth,  like  the  sunshine ;  law, 
like  the  thunder  and  the  lightning;  mystical  influences, 
like  the  unseen  touches  of  the  atmosphere — these,  in  their 
combination,  make  the  completeness  of  that  literature 
with  which,  from  Paul  and  John  down  to  Maurice  and 
Channing  and  Bushnell,  Christianity  has  blessed  the 
world.  Thus  she  has  brought  her  blessed  power  into 
human  nature  through  all  its  open  doors. 

And  now  note  how  these  three  powers  in  man,  to  which 
all  hteratm-e  must  appeal,  are  the  intrinsic  powers  of  his 
vitality.  See  how,  if  he  lives  at  all,  he  must  live  in  them ; 
see  how,  if  they  are  dead  within  him,  there  is  no  true 
vitality  left — and  then  you  see,  I  think,  what  is  the  real 
truth  concerning  the  approach  of  literatm-e  to  man.  Cui*i- 
osity,  obedience,  admiration — these  are  the  powers  of  all 
man's  life.  The  desii-e  to  know  the  true,  to  do  the  right, 
to  be  the  good — these  are  what  make  him  man.  In  the 
increase  of  the  acti\'ity  of  these  his  manhood  grows.  If 
there  were  no  such  thing  as  literature,  these  powers  would 
still  be  active,  and  be  the  precious,  the  indispensable,  pre- 
rogatives and  proof -marks  of  his  humanity.  If  there 
were  no  book  for  him  to  open,  stdl  man  would  use  and 
grow  by  and  live  in  these  same  powers  of  curiosity  and 
obedience  and  admiration  to  which  the  books  appeal.  He 
would  put  puzzled  questions  to  the  earth  and  to  the  sky. 
He  would  ask  commandments  of  the  stars  and  his  own 
soul.  He  would  crave  communion  with  nature  and  with 
his  dim  thought  of  God. 

Wliat  then?  What  follows?  Does  not  this  follow, 
and  is  it  wot  most  important — that  the  powers  to  which 
the  books  appeal,  the  powers  to  which  literature  speaks, 
are  not  peculiar,  special  powers,  which  have  no  activity 
in  man  except  as  he  is  the  reader  of  books,  but  are  the 
common  and  familiar  powers  of  his  universal  life  ?     That 


474  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

the  vitality  which  literature  finds  and  feeds  is  the  same 
vitality  with  which  man  does  all  his  living  work,  and  gets 
all  his  knowledge  ?  That,  therefore,  the  first  great  quah- 
fication  of  a  man,  in  order  that  he  may  be  healthily  fed 
b}'-  the  best  literature,  is  not  the  possession  of  some  arti- 
ficial tastes,  the  develojjment  of  some  unusual  and  highly 
trained  capacity,  but  the  activity  of  the  simple,  funda- 
mental human  powers — in  other  words,  that  the  livest 
man  will  be  the  best  reader  of  the  best  books?  That 
what  you  have  to  do  with  your  own  or  any  nature,  in 
order  to  make  it  receptive  of  the  truest  knowledge,  or  the 
wisest  guidance,  or  the  noblest  inspirations,  is  to  make  it 
thoroughly  alive  in  all  its  best  and  broadest  human  powers  ? 
Do  we  see  anything  in  the  history  of  human  learning  to 
justify  that  idea '?  Do  we  not  all  know  how  often  scholar- 
ship has  wasted  itself  by  being  poured  into  a  nature  which 
had  no  vitality  to  receive  it  ?  Are  not  our  colleges  only 
too  rich  in  pedants  the  failure  of  whose  career  lies  here, 
in  that  their  manhood  was  dead  or  only  half  alive,  and  so 
their  learning  found  no  real  welcome  or  digestion,  and  lay 
in  them,  and  lies  in  them  still,  crude,  hard,  unsoftened, 
and  unsweetened  into  wisdom?  What  our  colleges  need 
to-day  is,  not  more  learning  for  their  men,  but  more  men 
for  their  learning.  The  little  conceited  specialist,  with 
small  curiosity  and  less  obedience  and  no  admiration,  is 
incapable  of  the  fullest  approach  and  entrance  of  truth. 
Let  him  read  what  books  he  will,  he  goes  unfed.  The 
anxiety  of  every  man  who  cares  for  the  higher  education 
to-day  must  be  as  to  how  that  healthy  process  of  perpetual 
reaction  can  be  kept  alive  by  which  more  knowledge  shall 
always  make  the  men  to  whom  it  comes  more  broadly  and 
profoundly  human,  and  so  more  fit  for  the  healthiest  re- 
ception of  yet  more  knowledge,  which  shall  fii'st  come  to 
them  because  they  are,  and  then  shall  make  them  yet  more 
to  be,  true  and  living  men. 


LITERATURE  AND  LIFE.  475 

In  that  anxieby,  we  look  about  us  here,  and  are  very 
thankful  for  Chautauqua.  Unless  I  much  misjudge,  the 
system  which  is  represented  under  these  spreading  trees 
has  something  to  say  to  the  problem  at  which  we  have 
just  been  giving  a  hasty  glance.  You  are  students  who 
are  not  separated  or  (iivorced  from  life.  Life,  and  not 
literature,  is  to  you  the  primary  and  most  potent  fact. 
You  are  refreshing  your  vitality  all  the  time  out  of  those 
great  eternal  fountains  which  God  forever  keeps  open 
for  His  children,  lest  they  die  out  of  theii'  humanness  into 
stones,  or  brutes,  or  machines.  Fatherhood,  motherhood, 
brotherhood,  sisterhood,  the  home  life,  practical  labor,  the 
need  of  sacrificing  self  for  others,  the  necessity  of  fore- 
thought, the  wrestling  with  difficulties — these  are  the 
things  which  make  men  live.  It  is  to  lives  fed  out  of 
these  fountains  that  your  books  open  themselves,  and 
your  teachers  speak.  It  is  to  natures  which  have  been 
taught  curiosity,  docility,  and  admiration  in  the  great 
school  of  hving,  that  this  Chautauqua  College  opens  her 
hospitable  gates,  and  says,  "  Come,  learn  !  "  with  a  peculiar 
hopefulness. 

Wliat  is  there  to  expect  ?  May  we  not  say,  a  very  vivid 
grasp  and  hold  on  learning?  Maj^  we  not  believe,  if  the 
students  of  Chautauqua  be  indeed  what  we  have  every 
right  to  expect  that  they  will  be,  men  and  women  thor- 
oughly and  healthily  alive,  through  their  perpetual  con- 
tact with  the  facts  of  life,  that  when  they  take  the  books 
which  have  the  knowledge  in  them,  like  pure  water  in 
silver  urns,  though  they  will  not  drink  as  deeply,  they 
wiU  drink  more  healthily  than  many  of  those  who  in  the 
deader  and  more  artificial  life  of  college  halls  bring  no 
such  eager  vitality  to  give  value  to  their  draft  ? 

If  I  understand  Chautauqua,  this  is  what  it  means :  it 
finds  its  value  in  the  vitality  of  its  students.  It,  of  neces- 
sity, sacrifices  thoroughness.    It  knows  and  feels  that  sac- 


476  ESSAYS  AND   ADDIiESSES. 

rince.  It  recognizes  that  if  it  were  possible  to  fill  each 
one  of  its  students  with  all  that  every  science  has  to  give, 
each  student  would  be  the  better  for  it.  It  has  not,  and 
it  must  not  come  to  have,  any  contempt  for  the  completer 
training  which  is  the  privilege  of  those  who  can  give 
their  whole  time  to  study.  It  acknowledges  that  if  he 
can  Iveep,  as  he  certainly  may  keep,  a  healthy,  live,  s;^Tiipa- 
thetic  humanity  through  all  his  work,  the  finished  scholar 
in  any  department  is  happier  and  more  successful  than 
the  most  interested  amateur.  It  honors  the  father  of 
Louis  Agassiz,  wanting  to  touch,  even  with  the  tip  of  his 
lips,  the  science  of  which  his  son  was  drinking  to  the  full ; 
but  it  owns  that  the  son's  lot  was  richer  and  more  blessed. 
It  does  not  dishonor  thoroughness,  it  does  not  magnify 
superficiahiess ;  but  it  does  say  that  life  is  the  truest  and 
best  condition  for  the  reception  of  learning.  It  does  de- 
clare that  a  seed  has  more  chance  of  growth  in  a  flower- 
pot of  mold  than  in  a  hundred  acres  of  sand.  While  it 
does  not  disown  the  importance  of  habits  of  study,  and  of 
the  apparatus  and  environment  of  learned  life,  it  believes 
and  declares  that  far  more  important  is  the  spirit  of  the 
student ;  and  so  it  summons  those  who  are  alive  with  true 
liunum  hunger  to  come  and  learn  what  they  can  learn  of 
that  great  world  of  knowledge  of  which  he  who  knows 
the  most  knows  such  a  very  little,  and  feels  more  and 
more,  with  every  increase  of  his  knowledge,  how  very 
little  it  is  that  he  knows. 

It  would  l)e  a  great  misfortune  if  Chautauqua,  with  all 
the  interest  which  it  excites,  and  all  the  success  of  which 
it  has  to  boast,  should  seem  to  give  any  praise  to  super- 
ficialness,  or  to  make  any  less  precious  than  men  think  it 
now,  that  thoroughness  of  scholarship  which  is  so  rare, 
even  among  our  professed  and  consecrated  scholars.  We 
are  assured  tliat  that  ^vill  not  be  its  working.  Those  who, 
in  the  gracious  and  helpful  training  of  Chautauqua,  come 


LITER ATUBE  AXD   LIFE.  '^71 

on  to  the  sacred  soil  of  any  science,  tread  its  firm  ground, 
and  see  the  richness  of  its  landscape,  will  siu*ely  not  count 
it  less  but  far  more  sacred  than  they  counted  it  when 
they  were  wholly  strangers  to  its  fascination.  Poor  is 
the  student's  soul  in  which  familiarity  with  his  science 
breeds  contempt  of  it.  Rather,  he  who  knows  something, 
and  is  well  aware  how  little  it  is  that  he  knows,  will  re- 
joice with  all  his  heart  that  there  are  others  whose  privi- 
lege it  is  to  know  more,  and  will  sit  eagerly  listening  for 
what  tidings  they  who  have  pushed  on  deep  into  the  heart 
of  the  Promised  Land  shall  bring  back  to  those  who  sit 
wondering  and  thankful  in  the  richness  of  its  borders. 

And  yet,  sure  as  I  am  that  our  culture  here  will  never 
be  so  perverted  as  to  clothe  superficialness  with  any  un- 
real glory,  I  still  think  it  may  be  well  for  all  of  us  to  be 
upon  our  guard  over  our  own  standards,  and  to  take  some 
precaution  that  thoroughness  may  never  lose  that  high 
esteem  which  it  ought  ever  to  keep  in  all  our  eyes ;  not 
merely  for  learning's  sake,  but  for  our  own.  How  shall 
that  be  done  f  I  have  only  one  suggestion  to  make.  Is 
it  not  well  that  each  of  us  whom  the  culture  of  this  insti- 
tution, and  the  spirit  of  the  time,  incline  to  a  discursive 
largeness  in  our  reading  and  study,  should  have  some  one 
well-chosen  subject  in  which  he  shall  endeavor  to  go  as 
deep  as  possible,  and  know  all  that  he  can?  Is  it  not 
good  that  in  our  great  farm,  fed  on  the  surface  by  the 
ever-bounteous  skies,  there  should  be  somewhere  one  deep, 
cool  well  which  should  pierce  as  deep  as  possible,  and  for- 
ever remind  us  of  how  the  true  sources  of  supply  lie  far 
below  f  Surely  such  a  habit  would  keep  alive  our  love  of 
thoroughness,  which  is  the  thing  which  a  man  most  needs 
in  the  world,  even  in  relation  to  those  things  in  which  liis 
circumstances  compel  him  to  do  superficial  work. 

In  the  literary  world  to-day  there  are  two  figures  whose 
faces  are  exceedingly  familiar;  we  all  know  them  well 


478  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

One  of  them  is  called  the  special  student;  the  other  is 
known  as  the  general  reader.  The  fii'st  has  his  home 
chiefly  at  Cambridge,  but  is  to  be  seen  at  all  our  colleges. 
The  second  lives  at  Boston,  but  lives  also  everywhere  else 
where  there  are  brightness  and  books.  Both  of  them 
have  much  that  is  good,  and  some  things  which  are  not 
good,  about  them.  The  iirst  is  full  of  knowledge,  but  is 
a  little  hard  and  narrow,  as  if  he  had  been  fed  on  needles. 
The  second  is  full  of  sympath}',  but  liis  face  has  a  little 
haziness  about  it,  as  if  he  had  feasted  upon  fog.  The 
first  is  intensive  ;  the  second  is  extensive.  By  the  labors 
of  the  special  student  learning  is  deepened ;  by  the  labors 
— shall  we  call  them  ? — of  the  general  reader  learning  is 
broadened.  The  work  of  the  first  is  to  dig  wells ;  the 
work  of  the  second  is  to  dig  ditches.  I  am  not  sure  that 
it  is  not  fated  that  these  two,  so  often  separated  from 
each  other,  so  often  suspicious  of  each  other,  should  meet, 
and  look  into  each  other's  eyes,  and  know  each  other  for 
friends  and  fellow-workers  at  Chautauqua.  At  any  rate, 
I  believe  that  they  are  destined  to  meet  somewhere — or, 
indeed,  that  they  are  meeting  e^s^erywhere — in  the  spirit 
of  this  reconciling  age  of  ours,  this  age  which  knows  the 
need  of  thoroughness,  and  also  knows  the  need  of  life ; 
and  which,  while  it  would  like  to  have  both  dispositions 
meet  in  the  person  of  each  one  of  its  scholars,  yet,  if  that 
cannot  be,  gives  welcome  to  every  reading  man  or  woman 
who  brings  either  disposition  as  a  contribution  to  its 
character  and  growth. 

The  fact  is,  that  in  these  days  of  ours,  Uterature,  like 
theology,  has  broken  loose,  and  there  is  temporary  trou- 
ble. Happily  in  both  cases  the  confusion  comes  from 
increase  and  not  from  deficiency  of  life,  and  so  it  will  be 
all  right ;  it  wiU  be  vastly  better  than  ever  in  the  end,  but 
for  a  time  there  is  disorder.  The  fences  are  swept  away. 
Land  which  seemed  consecrated  to  dryness  is  deep  under 


LITERATVBE  AND   LIFE.  479 

the  waters  of  life.  The  old  channels  cannot  be  found ; 
men  seek  for  them  in  vain. 

The  two  cases  are  very  like  each  other.  There  are  no 
longer  certain  men  to  whom  theology  is  exclusively  com- 
mitted, experts  in  the  things  of  God.  Nor  is  there  any 
more  a  sacred  caste  of  people  who  write  books.  The  peo- 
ple are  all  priests.  The  people,  almost  all,  are  authors. 
And  yet,  in  theology  and  in  literature  alike,  never  had  the 
real  priest,  the  priest  who  bears  the  true  priestly  witness 
in  his  face  and  voice,  the  priest  whose  priestliness  is  in 
the  convictions  and  sympathies  of  his  soul,  and  not  in  the 
robe  upon  his  shoulders — never  had  the  real  priest  such 
a  chance  of  power  as  he  has  to-day. 

Literature  and  theology  are  both  claiming  all  the  world 
for  their  field,  all  the  interests  of  mankind  for  their  care. 

Literature  and  theology  are  both  full  of  discontent  and 
full  of  hope.  Both  of  them  are  appealing  for  recognition, 
not  to  a  few  trained  faculties,  or  to  a  ''  religious  public  " 
or  a  '' literary  world,"  but  to  human  life  everywhere,  in 
its  primary  emotions  and  its  universal  needs. 

Both  theology  and  literature  are  overwhelmed  with  the 
tremendous  mass  and  infinite  variet}^  of  the  material 
which  is  being  poured  in  upon  them,  and  which  they  can- 
not cast  aside ;  yet  both  alike  are  feeling  dim  but  certain 
intimations  of  a  latent  unity  in  the  great  multitude  of 
things,  and  are  searching  for  the  key  whose  touch  shall 
bid  that  unity  spring  forth  to  sight,  and  be  the  great 
solution  of  our  wonder  and  our  fear. 

Such  are  theology  and  literature  to-day.  Is  it  not  good, 
indeed,  to  be  counted  to-day  in  any  humblest  degree 
among  the  Christian  scholars  ? 

But  I  have  kept  you  much  too  long.  Now,  in  a  few 
last  words,  which  shall  be  hardly  more  than  apothegms, 
let  me  try  to  sum  up  the  practical  consequences  which  I 
think  result  from  our  doctrine,  that,  the  fuller  the  healthy 
vitality  of  anv  man  becomes,  the  more  truly  does  he  be- 


480  ESSAYS  JXD   ADDHESSES. 

come  receptive  of  the  best  effect  of  books,  the  more  capa- 
ble is  he  of  being  fed  by  literatm-e. 

1.  First,  deej^est,  truest  of  all,  let  us  say  this :  that  all 
life  completes  itself  in  the  divine  life.  He  lives  most  truly 
and  intensely  who  lives  nearest  to  the  great  source  of  life, 
which  is  God.  Therefore  it  is  to  him  who  really  counts 
himself,  and  tries  in  actual  experience  to  be,  the  son  of 
God,  that  literature  brings  its  best  messages.  To  hiui, 
full  of  the  highest  curiosity,  which  is  faith,  and  the  high- 
est obedience,  which  is  consecration,  and  the  highest  ad- 
miration, which  is  divine  love — to  him  truth  enters  full- 
statured  through  every  door.  Alas  that  men  have  said, 
alas  that  l^igotry  has  given  men  the  right  to  say,  that 
much  which  called  itself  the  fear  of  the  Lord  was  not  the 
beginning,  but  the  end,  of  wisdom !  None  the  less  is 
that  true  what  John  wrote  to  his  disciples  in  such  sublime 
realization  of  their  possibilities  that  those  possibilities 
seemed  to  him  already  present  and  achieved  possessions : 
"Ye  have  an  unction  from  the  Holy  One,  and  ye  know 
all  things." 

2.  And  secondl}^,  since  life  is  a  thing  of  cpiality  rather 
than  of  quantity;  since,  that  is,  all  living  things,  from 
least  to  greatest,  in  virtue  of  their  life,  are  one  with  one 
another,  and  every  life  in  the  wondrousness  of  its  quality 
is  infinite — therefore  it  will  be  more  and  more  the  quality 
rather  than  the  quantity  of  knowledge  which  will  be  of 
importance  in  studying  and  learning  men.  At  least  the 
quality  of  knowledge  will  be  primarily  important,  and 
only  after  that  the  quantity.  Not  what  we  know,  so  much 
as  the  way  in  which  we  know  everything ;  not  how  much 
do  we  know,  but  how  do  we  know — that  is  the  question 
that  is  significant.  Get  the  quality  right,  and  an  eternity 
of  living  in  the  light  of  God  will  take  care  of  the  quantity. 

3.  And  thirdly,  since  life  is  perfect  in  the  individual 
only  as  it  feels  and  owns  its  share  in  the  great  multitude 
of  life  which  fills  the  mass,  so  no  man's  personal  relation 


LITEEATUEE  AXD    LIFE.  481 

to  literature  is  complete  unless  it  feels  and  owtis  about  it 
this  great  mixed  mass  of  ignorance  and  knowledge  and 
half -knowledge  which  makes  up  the  woi'Ul.  All  exclu- 
sive, selfish,  aristocratic  learning  is  vulgar,  and  loses  the 
best  fineness  of  scholarship ;  is  turbid,  and  loses  the  best 
brightness  of  light.  Whatever  else  is  aristocratic  in  the 
world,  learning  must  be  democratic.  Every  man  who 
reads  must  read  for  all  men.  The  trutli  of  stewardship  is 
the  first  truth  of  the  study.  He  who  learns  selfishly  only 
half  learns. 

4.  And  yet  once  more :  this  close  union  of  literature 
and  Hfe  brings  us  encouragement.  It  gives  us  the  right 
to  believe  that  the  dangers  of  literature,  the  dangers  of 
learning,  are  the  same  as  the  dangers  of  life,  and  are  to 
be  met  in  the  same  way — by  deeper  entrance  into  that 
whose  sm-face  only  is  dangerous,  whose  heart  always  is 
serene  and  safe.  Life  has  its  dangers,  but  their  cure  is 
not  in  suicide.  Learning  has  its  dangers,  but  their  cure 
is  not  in  ignorance.  Forward,  not  backward,  into  greater 
life ;  forward,  not  backward,  into  greater  knowledge,  not 
into  less — there,  there  only,  lies  the  safety  of  the  man  or 
of  the  world.  No  man  was  ever  yet  hurt  by  knowing  too 
much.  All  harm  lias  come  by  knowing  too  httle.  A  little 
learning  is  a  dangerous  thing ;  but  the  danger  is  not  in 
the  learning,  but  in  the  littleness.  Get  more  !  Get  more  ! 
So  only,  so  only  can  you  be  safe. 

My  friends,  I  do  not  know  whether  I  have  rightly  in- 
terpreted the  spirit  of  Chautauqua.  It  is  my  first  admis- 
sion to  her  councils.  But  I  think  that  I  cannot  be  wi'ong 
in  beheving  that  she  stands,  above  aU  things,  for  the 
close,  essential,  inseparable  union  of  literatm^e  and  life. 
Long  may  she  live  !  Much  may  she  live  in  the  hves  of  all 
her  children  !  For  much  hfe,  if  what  I  have  said  to-day 
be  true,  must  mean  wide  welcome  to  truth ;  the  power 
richlv  to  receive  and  richlv  to  transmit  the  light  of  God. 


HENRY   HOBSON   RICHARDSON. 

{Harvard  Montlih/,  October,  1886.) 

From  the  day  when  he  entered  college,  in  1855,  to  the 
day  when  he  died,  full  of  honors,  in  1886,  Mr.  Richardson 
was  alwaj^s  a  true  son  of  Harvard.  His  student  life  was 
critical  in  his  career.  His  college  friendships  lived  with 
him  until  he  died.  He  never  lost  the  inspiration  of  Cam- 
bridge things  and  men.  His  growing  fame  made  the  place 
of  his  education  illustrious ;  and  when  his  work  was  done, 
two  of  his  most  characteristic  buildings — Sever  Hall  and 
the  new  Law  School — remained  among  the  treasures  of 
the  college  for  all  time  to  come. 

It  is  right  that  the  Harvard  MontJihj  should  devote  to 
him  a  few  pages  of  remembrance,  and  try  to  give  to  those 
who  did  not  know  him  some  idea  of  what  manner  of  man 
he  was. 

He  came  to  college  from  New  Orleans  in  the  years 
which  immediately  preceded  the  great  war.  He  was  a 
Southerner,  and  nobody  can  understand  him  or  his  career 
who  does  not  keep  that  fact  always  in  mind.  Deeply  as 
Richardson  fastened  his  life  into  the  life  of  the  region 
where  he  ultimately  lived,  he  always  carried  something  in 
his  nature  which  was  foreign  to  it.  Much  as  he  loved  to 
boast,  somewhat  fantastically,  that  he  was  descended  from 
the  sober  English  theologian  and  philosopher,  Dr.  Priest- 
ley, that  quiet  blood  had  mingled  with  lighter  and  more 
impetuous  currents  before  it  came  to  him.  He  kept  to 
the  end  much  of  the  spirit  of  the  Southerner  before  and 

482 


HENRY  HOBSOX  UICHABDSOX.  483 

during  the  Rebelliou,  a  spirit  of  recklessness  and  earnest- 
ness, which  were  often  strangely  and  strikingly  combined. 

His  college  days  are  too  recent  for  some  of  us  and  too 
remote  for  others  of  us  to  remember.  The  jiicture  of 
them  which  his  classmates  give  is  very  distinct.  They 
were  days  of  carelessness  and  plenty.  The  seriousness  of 
life  had  laid  hold  upon  him  less  even  than  it  does  upon 
most  college  men.  His  college  photograph  is  not  recog- 
nizable by  those  who  knew  him  only  when  he  had  become 
mature.  Nothing  about  him  was  precocious.  He  did  not 
lisp  in  plans  and  elevations.  Some  interest  in  mathemat- 
ics as  a  special  study  seems  to  be  all  that  is  remembered 
as  the  slightest  prophecy  of  what  was  to  come  later.  But 
at  the  time  he  was  known  only  for  the  peculiar  charm  of 
his  bright,  open  nature  and  for  the  sunshine  which  he 
brought  into  every  company  he  entered.  It  was  a  morn- 
ing period  of  simple  joy  in  life  which  was  capable,  although 
nobody  guessed  it  then,  of  richening  into  the  buoyant 
hopefulness,  the  manly  grasp  of  difficulties,  the  healthy 
love  of  living  and  working  which  those  who  saw  his  great 
years  know  so  well.  It  is  only  another  instance  in  which 
a  prophecy  is  recognized  after  its  fulfilment  which  no  man 
could  have  known  when  it  was  si^oken. 

The  choice  of  architecture  as  his  profession  seems  to 
have  been  made  in  the  last  half  of  his  senior  year ;  but  I 
cannot  find  that  anybody  knows  what  led  him  to  it,  or 
what  the  feelings  were  with  which  he  made  the  choice. 
During  all  his  life  he  did  true  things  of  which  he  con- 
sciously gave  very  little  account  to  himself.  He  was  apt 
to  be  wiser  than  he  knew — and  so  he  probably  was  here. 
It  is  not  at  all  likely  that  he  knew,  as  we  know  now,  how 
thoroughly  the  work  of  the  architect  was  the  work  for 
him ;  how  the  fii'm  grasp  of  solid,  palpable  material,  com- 
bined with  the  exercise  of  vivid  intelligence,  just  suited 
his  concrete  and  most  vivacious  intellect.     At  axvy  rate, 


484  ESSAYS  Axn  addresses. 

there  is  no  record  of  enthusiasm,  and  none  of  his  class- 
mates imagined  what  an  important  thing  had  happened 
when  his  choice  was  made. 

After  his  graduation  lie  went  to  Europe,  and  in  a  lei- 
surely sort  of  way  began  to  study.  His  biography  will  tell 
us  in  detail  how  life  changed  with  him  at  the  beginning 
of  the  war,  and  how  his  character  and  force  came  out 
under  two  impulses.  He  was  both  driven  and  drawn 
to  greatness.  Behind  him  came  the  pressure  of  poverty 
when  his  remittances  fi-om  home  were  cut  off  by  the  war. 
Before  him  was  always  opening  more  and  more  the  at- 
traction of  his  profession,  of  which  he  wrote,  in  1862 : 
"  The  more  I  see  and  know  of  architecture,  the  more 
majesty  the  art  gains.  Oh,  if  I  had  begun  at  nineteen  to 
study  it !  " 

The  letters  which  Richardson  wrote  during  these  years 
in  Paris,  from  1860  to  1865,  presented  a  delightful  picture 
of  the  making  of  a  man.  He  is  so  transparent  that  the 
process  is  perfectly  clear  to  one  who  watches  it.  Little 
by  little  poverty  and  the  need  of  work  are  separating  him 
from  his  old  luxurious  boy's  life.  Little  by  little  a  great 
art  is  claiming  the  liberated  worker  for  its  own.  It  is 
impossible  to  pity  him  for  his  privations.  What  are  they 
to  one  who  is  full  of  hope  and  is  just  feeling  his  genius? 
It  is  impossible  to  think  of  his  hard  work  and  cheap  li\'- 
ing  as  heroic.  It  was  too  buoyant  with  annual  spirits 
and  the  certainty  of  success.  But  it  is  the  negative  and 
the  positive  conditions ;  it  is  Hfe  saying  to  him,  "  There 
is  no  more  money  for  you ;  you  must  support  yourself," 
and  also,  ''  Here  is  your  work ;  here  is  your  great  art ;"  it 
is  the  sight  of  these  two  influences  together,  turning  the 
light-hearted  boy  into  the  brave-hearted  man,  that  makes 
these  years  picturesque  and  beautiful.  It  was  onl}^  when 
the  work  for  his  living  interfered  with  and  postponed  his 
study  that  he  felt  any  disposition  to  complain.     The  whole 


HENRY  ROBSON  RICHAEDSOX.  485 

experience  was  tlie  test  of  character  and  strength  coming 
just  at  the  right  time  and  in  the  right  way.  He  knew 
that  he  should  stand  it,  and  he  did. 

All  the  while  behind  his  personal  struggle  hung  the 
cloud  and  was  heard  the  solemn  tumult  of  the  war,  giv- 
ing his  struggle  breadth  and  seriousness.  It  was  good 
always,  in  later  life,  to  hear  his  slightest  reference  to 
those  years,  out  of  which  he  came  another  man,  and  yet 
evidently  the  man  that  he  had  been  meant  to  be. 

It  is  the  five  years  after  college  which  are  most  decisive 
in  a  man's  career.  Any  event  which  happens  then  has  its 
full  influence.  The  years  which  come  before  are  too  fluid. 
The  years  which  come  afterward  are  too  solid.  It  was  in 
these  yeai's  that  Eichardson  lost  his  property  and  caught 
sight,  as  he  says,  of  the  greatness  of  architecture. 

In  October,  1865,  he  came  back  to  America  and  began 
his  work.  The  war  was  over,  and  there  was  work  to  do. 
Soon  he  began  to  find  it,  or  it  began  to  find  him.  All  his 
first  work  seems  to  be  feeling  after  something  which  he 
has  not  found.  It  has  vigor  and  beauty,  but  not  the  posi- 
tiveness  and  purpose  to  which  he  afterward  came.  His 
genius  was  in  the  condition  of  proof  before  letter.  You 
saw  that  it  M^as  beautifid,  but  did  not  know  exactly  what 
it  meant.  One  or  two  Gothic  churches  belong  to  these 
earliest  years.  By  and  by  you  see  the  difference.  When 
he  built  Brattle  Street  Church  and  Trinity  Church  in 
Boston  he  knew  what  he  was  about.  By  the  year  1872, 
when  he  was  only  thirty-three  years  old,  he  had  attained 
that  degree  of  success  in  which  a  man  works  best ;  the 
earliest  strain  was  over;  he  was  freely  afloat  with  the 
broad  sea  before  him ;  and  he  had  developed  the  style  in 
which,  with  wonderful  richness  and  variety,  all  his  future 
work  was  done. 

From  1872  to  1886 — fourteen  years — was  the  great  full 
period  of  Richardson's  life  and  work.     And  M^liat  years 


486  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

they  were  !  He  had  realized  his  powers.  The  fire  of  dis- 
tinct genius,  indefinable  and  unmistakable,  was  burning 
lu-ightly.  His  buildings  opened  like  flowers  out  of  his 
life.  It  is  not  in  niy  purpose  now  to  name  even  his  great- 
est works,  or  to  describe  the  order  in  which  they  came, 
but  rather  to  characterize  some  of  the  qualities,  both  of 
the  man  and  of  his  Av^ork,  as  they  showed  themselves  in 
those  glorious  years  when — all  over  the  country,  in  Albany 
and  Washington  and  Boston  and  Cincinnati  and  Chicago, 
and  in  quiet  villages,  where  he  made  the  town  hall  and 
librar}^  a  perpetual  inspiration,  and  along  the  railroads, 
where  he  made  the  station-houses  bear  witness  to  the 
power  of  art  to  beautify  the  most  i)rosaic  uses,  and  in 
dwellings,  which  lie  filled  Avith  dignity  and  grace — every- 
where the  man  genuinely  and  spontaneously  blended  his 
own  nature  with  the  purposes  and  material  of  the  struc- 
tures which  he  built. 

The  first  quality  of  true  genius  certainly  was  in  all  that 
he  did.  It  was  instinctive  and  spontaneous.  Based  upon 
thorough  study,  genuinely  expressing  great  ideas,  it  yet 
was  true  that  there  was  much  in  Richardson's  work  of 
which  he  gave  and  could  give  to  himself  little  or  no  ac- 
count as  to  how  it  came  to  pass.  He  was  not  a  man  of 
theories.  His  life  passed  into  his  buildings  b}^  ways  too 
subtle  even  for  himself  to  understand. 

And  so  he  has  done  a  larger  work  than  he  ever  delib- 
erately resolved  to  do.  When  Mr.  Freeman  was  here  in 
America,  he  wrote,  in  the  midst  of  much  hearty  condem- 
nation of  our  architecture :  '*  In  these  round-arch  build- 
ings I  see  a  hope  for  a  really  good  American  stjde.  The 
thing  seems  to  have  come  by  itself,  and  the  prospect  is 
all  the  more  hopeful  if  it  has."  He  apparently  has  never 
heard  of  Richardson,  but  it  is  Richardson's  work  that  he 
is  feehng.  And  yet  no  man  ever  said  to  himself  less  than 
Richardson,   '-'I  will   make   a   style   of   architecture  for 


HENRY  HOBSON  BICHABDSON.  487 

America."  He  simply  did  his  work  in  his  own  way,  and 
the  style  was  there. 

It  is  a  style  of  breadth  and  simplicity  that  corresponds 
with  his  whole  nature.  Never  somber,  because  the  irre- 
pressible buoyancy  and  cheerfulness  of  his  life  are  in  it ; 
never  attaining  the  highest  reach  of  spirituality  and  ex- 
altation, for  his  own  being  had  its  strong  association  with 
the  earth,  and  knew  no  mystic  raptures  or  transcendental 
aspirations ;  healthy  and  satisfying  within  its  own  range, 
and  suggesting  larger  things  as  he  himself  always  sug- 
gested the  possession  of  powers  which  he  had  never  real- 
ized and  used — something  like  this  is  the  character  of  the 
buildings  which  he  has  left  behind  him. 

He  grew  simpler  as  he  grew  older  and  greater.  He 
often  seemed  to  disregard  and  almost  despise  detail  of 
ornament.  He  loved  a  broad,  unln-oken  stretch  of  wall. 
He  seemed  to  count,  with  Ruskin,  "a  noble  surface  of 
stone  a  fairer  thing  than  most  architectural  features  which 
it  is  caused  to  assume."  And  yet  out  of  this  simplicity 
could  burst  a  sumptuousness  of  design  or  decoration  all 
the  more  captivating  and  overwhelming  for  the  simplicity 
out  of  which  it  sprang.  I  have  heard  one  of  his  own  pro- 
fession call  him  "barbaric."  It  was  that  wliich  made  his 
work  delightful.  Whoever  came  in  contact  with  it  felt 
that  the  wind  l)lew  out  of  an  elemental  simplicity,  out  of 
the  primitive  life  and  fundamental  qualities  of  man.  And 
this  great  simplicity,  the  truthfidness  with  which  he  was 
liimself,  made  him  the  real  master  of  all  that  his  art  had 
ever  been,  made  it  possil^le  for  him,  without  concealment, 
to  take  some  work  of  other  days  and  appropriate  it  into 
work  of  his  own,  as  Shakespeare  took  an  Italian  tale  and 
turned  it  iuto  Slwlock  or  Othello. 

These  are  the  moral  qualities  of  his  architecture.  Of 
those  quahties  which  belong  more  technically  to  his  art, 
more  competent  and  special  pens  must  ^^^•ite.     But  these 


488  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

qualities  every  one  must  feel  who  stands  in  front  of  one 
of  Richardson's  great  buildings ;  and  the  same  qualities 
every  man  felt  who  came  to  know  him.  That  is  another 
note  of  genius.  The  man  and  his  work  are  absolutely 
one.  The  man  is  in  the  work,  and  the  work  is  in  the  man. 
So  Richardson  possessed  in  himself  that  solidity  without 
stolidity,  that  joyousness  without  frivolity,  which  his  best 
art  expresses.  He  was  as  entirely  free  from  affectation 
as  is  Sever  Hall.  He  was  too  large  to  be  jealous  of  other 
men.  "  I  never  saw  it,"  he  insisted  on  saj'ing  about  a  big, 
bad  house  of  a  brother-architect,  which  he  passed  every 
week  in  his  life.  He  took  people  into  the  confidence 
of  his  ideas  with  his  hearty  and  capacious  "Don't  you 
know?"  He  talked  of  himself  and  his  work  so  largely 
that  he  was  not  egotistical.  He  had  quick  sympathies 
with  subjects  of  which  he  knew  nothing.  He  gave  one 
as  much  reason  to  believe  as  almost  any  man  I  ever  knew 
that  tliei-e  is  truth  in  the  happy  theory  that  all  men  have 
all  faculties,  that  what  faculties  find  their  way  out  to 
activity  in  this  bit  of  a  life  is  largely  an  affair  of  chance, 
and  that  some  time,  somewhere,  all  faculties  in  all  men 
will  come  forth  into  activity. 

Richardson  built  for  Harvard  College,  Sever  Hall  and 
the  Law  School.  The  Law  School  is  good,  and  has  many 
of  his  best  qualities  in  it.  But  in  Sever  Hall  the  college 
most  happily  possesses  one  of  the  veiy  greatest  works  of 
this  great  son  of  hers.  His  interest  in  building  it  was 
very  deep,  and  he  put  into  his  first  work  for  his  college 
all  his  best  thought  and  power.  From  the  day  when  it 
was  finished  it  seemed  to  possess  the  yard,  as  all  his  build- 
ings took  possession  of  the  earth  they  stood  on,  as  he  him- 
self, without  pretentious  self-assertion,  took  possession  of 
every  scene  in  the  midst  of  which  he  stood.  Sever  Hall 
makes  the  other  modern  l)uildings  of  the  college  yard 
seem  like  visitors,  who  came,  and  who  will  go  again — for 


HENRY  HOBSOX  RICHARDSON.  489 

which  oue  wouki  not  grieve.  This  serious  and  cheerful 
structure  one  hardly  thinks  of  as  having  ever  come,  and 
one  rejoices  to  believe  that  it  will  stay  forever. 

Nowhere  does  this  identity  of  Richardson  and  his  work 
seem  more  impressive  than  in  that  unique  house  at  Brook- 
line  which  was  at  once  his  workshop  and  his  home.  No 
one  who  saw  it  when  it  was  filled  with  his  vitality  -will 
ever  lose  the  feeling  of  how  it  was  all  vital  like  a  thing 
that  had  gro\\ai,  of  how  the  household  rooms  gave  birth 
to  the  long  corridor  with  the  alcoves  in  which  the  work 
was  done,  and  then  the  long  stalk  blossomed  into  the  rich 
flower  of  the  master's  room,  in  which  the  fulness  of  his 
life  was  represented.  It  would  be  good  if  his  students 
would  tell  us  what  they  got  from  him.  He  himself  was 
to  have  delivered  one  of  the  lectures  on  the  jDrofessions 
in  his  own  Sever  Hall  last  winter.  It  is  interesting  to 
wonder  what  he  would  have  said,  but  unless  he  could  have 
made  himself  felt  by  his  audience,  his  lecture  could  never 
have  explained  his  power. 

The  loss  which  his  death  brought  to  his  friends  it  is 
not  possible  to  describe.  It  is  a  change  in  all  their  life. 
When  some  men  die  it  is  as  if  you  had  lost  your  jienknif  e, 
and  were  subject  to  perpetual  inconvenience  until  you 
could  get  another.  Other  men's  going  is  like  the  vanish- 
ing of  a  great  mountain  from  the  landscape,  and  the  out- 
look of  hfe  is  changed  forever. 

His  life  was  like  a  great  pictm-e  full  of  glowing  color. 
The  canvas  on  which  it  was  painted  was  immense.  It 
lighted  all  the  room  in  which  it  hung.  It  warmed  the 
chilliest  air.  It  made,  and  it  will  long  make,  life  broader, 
work  easier,  and  simple  strength  and  courage  dearer  to 
many  men. 


ADDRESS  AT    THE   DEDICATION   OF   THE   PEO- 
PLE'S INSTITUTE,  ROXBURY,  MASS.,  OCT.  1, 1890. 

Ladies  and  Gentlemen  :  This  is  one  of  tlie  occasions 
on  which  one  would  not  wiUingly  be  absent.  There  are 
always  things  happening  from  time  to  time  with  which 
one  likes  to  have  association ;  because  as  they  go  on,  with 
the  possibiHties  that  are  in  them,  he  likes  to  remember 
that  he  was  at  the  starting  of  a  stream  which  afterward 
widens  and  grows  into  a  great  and  mighty  river,  and  to 
feel  even  the  smallest  identification  with  what  comes  forth 
for  the  blessing  of  mankind.  So  if  it  had  not  been  my 
privilege  to  have  been  in^•ited  to  speak  at  this  gathering 
to-night,  I  should  have  liked  to  creep  into  some  obscure 
corner  of  this  room,  and  remember  that  I  was  present 
when  this  institution  was  opened. 

There  are  days  in  our  lives  which  we  always  like  to  re- 
member— days  in  which  we  saw  some  great,  good  deed 
take  shape,  and  show  itself  in  the  world ;  we  had  faith  in 
it,  though  a  very  blind  sort  of  faith.  We  have  afterward 
seen  it  go  forward  as  we  are  going  to  see  this  People's 
Institute  grow  and  spread  itself  until  it  not  only  fills  the 
capacity  of  tliis  room,  but  spreads  itself  abroad  to  multi- 
ply into  many  other  institutes. 

I  will  try  to  tell  you  the  thing  which  impresses  me 
most — the  tiling  probably  in  most  of  our  minds :  it  is  the 
absolute  simplicit}^  of  the  greatest  things. 

Here  is  something  that  has  never  been  seen  in  Boston, 
except  as  seen  in  its  mother  and  sister  institute,  the  Wells 

490 


DEDICATIOX  OF  THE  PEOPLE'S  IXSTITUTE.       491 

Memorial  Institute ;  and  our  tii-st  impulse  is  to  think  that 
it  must  be  something-  strange — that  the  powers  which 
have  given  it  bii'th  must  be  something-  very  rare,  and 
therefore  we  must  look  suddenly  and  quickly  because  it 
cannot  be  repeated  in  this  world.  On  the  contrary,  we 
see  that  these  things  spring  so  out  of  the  warmest  im- 
pulses of  onr  human  natiu'e  that  they  belong  to  all  men 
in  different  forms  and  shapes :  until  we  wonder  not  that 
any  really  good  thing  is  done  in  the  world,  but  our  wonder 
is  that  it  is  not  done  every  day. 

Think  what  this  institution  means,  as  it  stands  here  on 
Tremont  Street,  to  those  who  enter  into  its  doors,  and 
even  to  those  who  pass  by  its  doors  on  the  sidewalk ! 
Given  a  mutual  respect  between  men  whose  interests  are 
bound  together ;  given  public  spirit  on  the  part  of  those 
men  who  need  for  their  souls  the  large  range  of  a  whole 
community  in  which  they  may  work ;  gi^'en  the  power  of 
a  man  to  recognize  the  noblest  uses  and  the  best  right  of 
the  wealth  placed  in  his  hands :  and  then  you  have  this 
institution  or  some  other  institution,  and  that  for  which 
this  institution  stands — the  expression  of  large-hearted 
liberality,  noble  public  sentiment,  and  deep  personal  in- 
terest in  the  welfare  of  the  community  in  which  one  has 
gi'own  and  which  he  loves  with  all  his  heai't. 

Whom  shall  we  congratulate  to-night?  You  who  ai'e 
to  enter  into  the  privileges  of  this  institution,  we  congrat- 
ulate you ;  and  we  congratulate  you  who  may  not  find  it 
in  your  way  to  enter  into  its  privileges  in  months  to  come, 
but  who  are  going  to  be  richer  because  you  know  it  is 
here,  and  who  know  of  these  truths  of  which  we  have 
spoken,  and  feel  these  influences  which  are  inseparable 
from  this  spot. 

We  congratulate  the  city  of  Boston,  which  is  richer, 
not  merely  by  one  institution,  but  by  the  lighting  of  a 
new  flame  which  shall  kindle  with  its  light  other  institu- 


492  ESSAYS  AXD   JDDHESSES. 

tions  of  a  different  character  from  this,  but  with  tlie  same 
deep  convictions  out  of  whicli  this  has  sprung.  Tliese 
are  the  things  which  have  alwa^^s  been  in  tlie  workl  tak- 
ing different  forms — tlie  various  successive  forms  which 
a  new  age  and  condition  of  mankind  bring  forth. 

Above  all,  we  congratulate  him  whose  name  is  associ- 
ated with  this  work,  for  whom  you  have  just  cheered; 
him  who  has  had  it  in  his  power,  in  the  first  place,  to  be 
able,  and  in  the  second  place  to  desire  and  to  do  that 
which  has  taken  form  in  this  gracious  institution,  and 
■which  shall  go  forward  not  merely  perpetuating  his  name 
— no  noble  man  cares  for  that — but  perpetuating  those 
thiugs  for  which  he  cares,  and  making  them  a  poAver  in 
new  ways  in  the  w^orld  as  it  gi'ows  older  even  after  he 
shall  have  jjassed  away. 

These  are  all  old  principles ;  and,  as  I  sa}^,  the  marvel 
and  wonder  is,  as  we  look  at  an  institution  like  this, 
that  they  do  not  spriug  up  eternally.  The  marvel  of  our 
human  nature  is,  that  there  should  not  come  out  of  the 
depths  of  its  capacity  the  thing  that  the  world  needs. 
There  Avere  no  People's  Institutes  fifty  years  ago ;  there 
was  perhaps  no  need  then  for  People's  Institutes.  No 
doubt  there  are  tilings  lacking  that  ought  to  l)e  here  to- 
day— things  necessary  to  our  community  that  ought  to 
bless  our  community;  but  when  we  see  this  institution 
gi'owing  up  to  meet  the  need  of  the  world,  then  w^e  have 
great  faith  in  regard  to  the  future. 

I  never  go  to  London  but  I  see  a  dear  friend  of  mine, 
who  has  done  a  work  in  a  few  years  which  is  simply  a 
revelation — not  of  the  capacity  of  the  man :  he  is  not  a 
man  of  remarkable  capacity ;  he  is  not  a  man  of  genius 
in  any  sort  of  way ;  he  is  not  a  man  of  whom  you  would 
say.  We  must  hurry  and  get  all  w^e  can  out  of  him,  be- 
cause when  he  dies  we  never  shall  get  another  such  man  : 
but  he  is  a  simple,  true,  brave  man — a  man  of  keen  and 


DEDICATION  OF  THE  PEOPLE'S  INSTITUTE.       493 

quick  perceptions  of  what  others  need,  with  a  heart  full 
of  desh'e  to  manifest  his  care  for  men  Ijy  putting  in  their 
power  those  things  which  they  require.  ^Vlien  I  see  that 
man  at  the  center  of  a  great  club  of  several  hundred  mem- 
bers at  the  East  End  of  London,  which  it  is  impossible 
to  confine  mthin  any  four  walls,  and  see  each  time  I  go 
there  how  it  has  spread  forth  into  new  branches,  rooted 
in  some  new  part  of  that  arid  field  where  he  has  gone  to 
live — when  I  see  the  character  of  the  man  and  the  char- 
acter of  the  work,  I  simply  lift  up  my  hands  and  say,  "  It 
would  not  be  marvelous  if  the  millennium  should  come 
to-morrow  morning."  The  wonder  would  not  be  that  the 
millennium  should  come,  but  that  the  millennium  lags, 
that  it  does  not  come  at  once.  I  see  no  reason  why  there 
should  not  be  five  hundred  such  men  here  as  my  friend 
in  London.  Given  five  hundred  men  with  a  power  pre- 
cisely^ the  same  as  this  of  his — the  simple  power  that  be- 
longs to  hundreds  and  thousands  of  men,  only  it  is  not 
used  as  my  friend  uses  his  powers,  and  I  do  not  see  why 
they  should  not  be — the  man  is  not  different  from  others 
in  power,  but  the  light  dawned  upon  him,  and  he  saw 
what  the  true  use  of  human  power  was — and  I  say  to 
myself  that  the  wonder  would  not  be  that  the  day  of  re- 
generation of  mankind  should  break  to-morrow  morning ; 
the  wonder  woidd  be  that  it  does  not,  that  five  hundred 
men  do  not  spring  to  their  feet  and  say,  "  Let  me  do  some- 
thing that  would  make  life  worth  living."  Many  are  ask- 
ing to-da}',  "  Is  life  worth  living  ? "  There  are  things  to 
do  at  every  man's  hand  that  would  make  the  question 
impertinent  from  his  lips,  an  absm-d  question  for  him  to 
ask.  There  is  not  a  man  or  woman  so  shut  out,  so  bare 
of  influence,  so  robbed  of  capacity  for  loving  their  breth- 
ren, of  enlarging  their  life,  that  they  might  not  go  forth 
upon  fields  of  labor  so  actively  and  earnestly  that  to  ask 
them  if  life  was  worth  living  would  seem  to  them  to  be 


494  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

the  most  preposterous  of  questions,  and  tliey  would  turn 
their  backs  upon  you  while  they  went  forth  to  do  their 
work. 

My  friends,  there  is  no  good  work  in  this  world  which 
is  not  in  the  nature  of  an  experiment.  Even  the  great 
Christian  work  which  is  being  carried  forward  has  in  it 
the  elements  of  experiment.  The  cause  of  Christ  making 
men  blessed  in  its  gospel,  with  the  certainty  of  an  ulti- 
mate triumph,  is  in  the  nature  of  an  experiment.  Every 
great  question  is  an  experiment.  It  seems  to  me  the  only 
joy  of  life  is  in  experiment.  To  try  something  that  I 
could  see  absolutely  to  the  end,  that  I  could  see  how  it  was 
to  work  out,  until  I  saw  the  top  stone  put  on — it  would 
lose  its  interest  at  once. 

One  of  the  greatest  architects  of  this  citj^,  whose  fine 
work  all  about  rejoices  us,  drove  the  people  almost  crazy 
who  worked  with  him,  because  no  building  was  complete 
until  it  was  done.  He  never  knew  what  he  was  going  to 
accomplish  until  the  top  stone  was  put  on ;  and  then  the 
work  stood  forth. 

Wlio  dares  to  say  what  is  to  come  in  these  rooms  and 
out  of  this  institution  ?  Wlio  shall  dare  to  say  that  even 
the  good  work  the  Wells  Memorial  has  accomplished  is 
not  to  be  done  here ']  It  is  in  the  nature  of  an  experiment. 
ShaU  we  hesitate  because  it  is  an  experiment  ?  Shall  we 
still  go  on  wondering  how  we  can  possibly  try  a,  thing 
without  knowing  of  the  result?  Do  you  remember  the 
man  with  the  pair  of  tight  boots,  who  said  he  didn't  know 
what  he  was  going  to  do — he  would  have  to  wear  them  a 
day  or  two  before  he  could  get  them  on  ?  That  is  the  way 
with  the  man  who  tries  experiments.  Let  us  go  on  our 
way,  and  do  the  work  which  may  open  into  strange  and 
unguessed  regions. 

I  rejoice  with  any  man  who  stands  at  the  opening  of  a 
little  stream  like  this,  though  he  cannot  tell  into  what  it  is 


DEDICATION  OF  THE   PEOPLE'S  INSTITUTE.       495 

going  to  develop.  The  man  who  founded  this  Peoj)le's 
Institute — it  is  impossible  for  him  to  tell  to  what  uses 
this  may  grow. 

Only  one  thing  more.  Let  me  say  that  and  then  sit 
down.  One  thing  is  absolutely  essential,  my  friends  :  that 
is,  that  the  spirit  out  of  which  this  institution  has  sprung 
should  run  through  every  part  and  portion  of  its  life.  It 
is  good  to  hear  reports  like  those  from  the  Wells  Memorial 
to-night.  It  is  good  that  men  should  learn  where  they 
may  save,  that  they  may  put  to  the  best  possible  use  the 
dollars  and  the  quarters  that  God  gives  into  their  hands. 
There  shall  be  a  deeper  spirit  in  this  institute  along  with 
that,  working  through  that,  making  continual  use  of  that 
which  shall  perpetuate  the  name  of  its  founder,  and  bring 
it  forward  again  and  again  upon  the  lips  of  these  people. 

The  idea  of  trusteeship — the  idea  that  that  which  a  man 
has  he  has  not  for  himself — is  the  true  idea.  The  man 
who  misuses  the  trust  with  which  he  is  intrusted — who 
uses  it  for  his  own  use — goes  to  Charlestown  prison.  The 
man  who  holds  funds  that  belong  to  the  great  vrorld  and 
humanity  who  uses  them  for  his  own  luxur}',  or  for  the 
pleasure  of  bathing  his  hands  in  thein  as  they  accumulate 
in  his  chest — shall  we  count  him  a  worthy  man  ?  At  least 
we  will  say  this,  that  he  is  shutting  himself  out  of  the 
noblest  pleasure  that  belongs  to  hunum  life.  One  of  the 
greatest  benefactors  that  this  world  has  seen — one  who 
has  left  his  name  so  marked  in  the  great  beneficences  of 
the  world  that  he  has  made  it  proverbial — came  to  the 
true  knowledge  of  the  use  and  capacity  of  human  life 
when  he  was  an  old  man ;  and  he  was  heard  to  sa}^  again 
and  again  that  if  men  only  knew  what  the  true  pleasure 
of  life  was  when  they  began  to  count  what  was  given  to 
them  as  not  for  their  own  use  but  as  belonging  to  others, 
they  would  not  have  to  be  urged ;  they  could  not  keep 
their  hands  out  of  their  pockets,  as  they  drew  forth  for 


496  ESSAYS  AXD   ADDRESSES. 

the  use  of  the  worhl,  for  whom  it  was  intrusted  to  their 
care. 

That  applies  not  only  to  money,  hut  to  everything  which 
a  man  owns  of  life  and  truth.  You  have  no  business  to 
believe  even  your  creed  in  any  such  way,  that  it  is  only 
to  be  used  for  your  own  soul.  You  nuist  believe  your 
creed  as  a  trust ;  it  Avas  not  given  to  you  that  you  might 
save  only  your  own  soul,  but  given  that  the  world  might 
be  purer  and  happier.  The  comfort,  joy,  happiness,  bless- 
ing, and  companionship  that  you  give  to  yourself  in  this 
building — they  are  just  as  truly  trusts  put  into  jowr  hands 
as  was  the  money  put  into  the  hands  of  him  who  founded 
this  institute.  This  spirit  nuist  run  into  every  part  of  it, 
must  fill  every  class-room,  making  it  glow,  not  witii  the 
selfish  avidity  of  knowledge  for  some  selfish  use,  but  mak- 
ing it  glow  with  that  divine  hunger  after  knowledge  that 
all  nobler  souls  have  that  they  may  make  better  the  world. 
It  must  pervade  the  whole,  making  saving  even,  which  is 
so  apt  to  be  a  sordid  and  disgraceful  thing,  become  a  sacred 
and  glorious  thing  ;  because  that  wLich  is  saved  makes  up 
an  endowment  for  the  use  of  one's  fellow-men. 

I  beUeve  that  any  such  thing  must  l^e  a  consecration  to 
Him  who  is  the  Father  of  all  men,  and  for  whom  this 
work  must  be  done ;  that  the  fire  lighted  at  the  beginning 
of  this  work  cannot  fade  out  as  its  histoiy  goes  on ;  that 
it  must  go  on  pervading  every  part  of  the  life  of  this 
institution,  as  it  opens  into  new  and  perhaps  most  un- 
expected forms  of  developed  activity. 

But  there  remains  one  ching  which  I  desire  to  litter — 
the  eternal  truth  of  life  :  that  no  man  truly  owns  anything 
except  that  which  he  consecrates  to  the  service  of  God  and 
his  fellow-men. 

Thei'efore  with  that  great  faith  in  its  future,  with  that 
belief  in  that  which  is  to  be — the  faith  which  is  to  pervade 
it,  we  saj',  cordially,  sincerely,  and  very  cheerfully,  "  God- 
speed to  the  People's  Institute." 


ADDRESS  AT  A  MEETING  IN  BEHALF  OF  THE 
CHILDREN'S  AID   SOCIETY,  PHILADEL- 
PHIA, PA.,   JANUARY   30,   1892. 

Mr.  President,  Ladies,  and  Gentlemen  :  To  any  one 
who  has  had  the  pvivileg-e  for  many  happy  years,  altliough 
it  were  many  years  ago,  of  watching  the  spontaneous  and 
delightful  generosity  of  the  citizens  of  Philadelphia,  it  is 
indeed  a  great  delight  to  come  back  and  recognize  that 
Vvhieh  he  knew  well  enough  to  be  the  fact,  that  in  the 
years  that  have  come  between  that  great,  rich  stream  of  be- 
nevolence and  ever-thoughtful  generosity  has  been  widen- 
ing and  deepening.  It  is  just  exactly  as  when  one  comes 
back,  having  made  a  journey  across  lots,  and  finds  again 
a  great  stream  by  whose  side  he  has  journe3'ed  before,  in 
whose  company  he  has  rejoiced,  and  sees  how  it  has  grown 
richer  and  deeper  in  the  courses  in  Avliich  he  has  been 
separated  from  it. 

You  told  us,  sir,  at  the  beginning  of  this  meeting,  of 
the  t\v<)  purposes  of  such  a  meeting  as  this.  One  of 
them  is  the  gathering  up  of  the  report  of  what  has  ])een 
accomplished  by  such  a  society  as  this,  and  the  distinct 
recognition,  by  those  who  have  not  had  the  opj^ortunity 
of  knoAving  much  about  it  before,  of  what  the  methods 
of  its  working  are.  The  first  purpose  of  such  a  meet- 
ing is  information.  I  cannot  help  thinking  we  have  been 
richly  supplied  with  information  here  this  evening.  We 
have  seen  what  this  society  does ;  that  its  work  is  a 
simple  work.     It  is  an  effort  ever^^where  to  reinstate  into 

497 


498  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

the  systeni  of  our  liuniaii  life  tliat  little  atom  whicli 
lias  been  in  any  way  separated  from  it.  Nothing  lives 
except  in  the  system  to  whicli  it  belongs.  Nothing  lives 
except  it  is  natural.  Nothing  is  natural  absolutely  by 
itself.  Nothing  is  natural  exee2)t  it  be  taken  into  the 
system  of  nature  in  which  it  natni'all}^  inheres  and  follows 
the  movement  of  the  whole  about  it.  And  so  the  whole 
meaning  of  our  society  is  that  aiw  little  atom  of  our  hu- 
manity which  has  been"  cast  out  of  the  rich  and  ever-swell- 
ing sj'stem  of  our  human  life  shall  be  just  as  far  and  just 
as  quickly  as  possible  reinstated  where  it  lielongs.  Eveiy- 
thing  we  have  heard  from  the  good  doctor,  who  let  us  look 
into  the  deep  and  awful  secrets  which  belong  to  the  life 
of  this  society,  from  its  managers,  from  its  treasurer, 
everything  we  have  heard  shows  us  that  perpetual  effort 
of  good  women  and  trne  men  to  reinstate  into  its  true 
place  the  atom  of  our  human  life  which  has  been  sepa- 
rated from  the  condition  and  position  in  Avhicli  it  belongs. 
The  second  object  of  such  a  meeting  as  this  was.  to  stir 
enthusiasm,  so  you  told  us.  In  other  words,  it  is  to  see 
the  richness  and  the  beauty  and  the  glory  of  that  which 
we  are  doing.  We  lose  ourselves  in  the  midst  of  multi- 
tudinous details.  We  lose  ourselves  in  those  things  which 
are  absolutely  essential,  and  those  things  without  which 
life  in  a  society  such  as  this  cannot  possibly  exist,  but 
which,  when  we  have  buried  ourselves  in  the  midst  of 
them,  too  often  obscure  the  very  rich  meaning  which  be- 
longs to  the  whole.  We  want  to  feel  the  glory  of  such  a 
work  as  this  which  this  society  is  doing.  It  seems  to  mo 
also  that  we  want  to  do  that  which  I  always  feel  impelled 
to  do  when  I  have  the  privilege  of  saying  a  word  or  two 
at  the  close  of  a  meeting  such  as  this.  I  want  to  give  the 
thanks  of  this  community,  and  the  thanks  of  all  that  this 
community  represents,  for  it  is  impossible  in  the  rich  com- 
n\unication  of  life  in  which  we  live  with  one  another  to 


IME   CHILDREN'S   AID   SOCIETY.  499 

separate  ourselves  iuto  communities  and  think  anytliing 
can  be  done  in  Philadelphia  for  which  Massachusetts  and 
Illinois  and  Georgia  are  not  the  richer.  We  want  to  rec- 
ognize the  thankfuhiess  which  every  part  of  our  country 
owes  to  those  willing  to  step  forward  in  this  work.  Truly 
it  is  very  little  you  and  I  can  do,  to  come  here  on  a  plea- 
sant evening  for  an  hour  or  two  and  praise  and  rejoice  in 
the  work  that  has  been  done,  and  make  our  contributions 
to  the  continuance  of  that  work,  when  we  think  what  it  is 
they  are  doing  who  have  summoned  us  here.  They  have 
gone  forward.  They  have  taken  the  l^runt  of  the  labor. 
They  have  given  anxious  care,  they  have  given  perpetual 
devotion  to  this  work  to  which  we  now  say  Godspeed,  and 
to  which  in  the  proper  time  I  am  sure  you  will  not  refuse 
your  abundant  assistance. 

It  almost  seems  to  me  like  the  old  days  in  Philadelpliia 
which  come  back  to  me  from  the  time  I  walked  her  streets, 
when  we  sat  here  at  home  and  felt  beating  the  pulse  of 
war  at  the  front,  when  Ave  rejoiced  for  every  little  thing 
we  could  do  to  make  the  soldiers  at  the  front  know  our 
hearts  were  with  them,  to  let  them  understand  it  was 
not  in  any  supine  indifference,  not  in  any  sense  that  the 
great  work  which  they  were  doing  belonged  to  them  and 
not  to  us,  that  we  dared  to  take  that  place  which  many 
of  us  look  back  upon  now  almost  with  shame.  At  least 
we  rejoiced  then  for  everything  we  could  do  to  cheer  their 
souls  and  strengthen  their  arms.  So  let  it  be  with  those 
Avho  stand  forward  here  and  voluntarily  with  noble  con- 
secration undertake  this  labor  which  belongs  to  the  con- 
duct of  a  great  work  like  this.  Let  them  not  lack  the 
pei-petual  Godspeed  and  the  continual  assistance  and  sup- 
port of  those  who  simply  watch  and  bless  what  they  are 
doing. 

It  is  impossible  for  us  to  see  the  limits  of  a  work  like 
this.     As  one  studies  the  lessons  of  such  things  as  have 


500  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

been  said  to  us  to-uight,  how  his  thought  opens  into  the 
future !  The  richness  of  these  days  in  which  we  live  is 
that  it  is  impossible  for  us  not  to  anticipate  the  future. 
I  think  there  have  been  certain  ages  in  the  world's  history 
in  which  there  has  been  almost  no  anticipation  of  things 
to  come,  when  it  seemed  almost  as  if  men  lived  in  the 
days  in  which  they  were  especially  situated  and  did  not 
look  forward,  did  not  feel  that  the  present  is  inseparably 
bound  to  the  future,  and  that  it  was  impossible  to  live  in 
the  present  worthily  unless  they  anticipated  the  future. 
There  have  been  times  in  the  world's  history  in  which  it 
seemed  almost  that  was  the  case,  but  it  has  absolutely 
ceased  now.  In  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  surely 
we  do  look  forward  into  the  twentieth  century.  Peering 
into  the  vast  distance,  let  us  try  to  anticipate  the  days  that 
are  going  to  be.  It  seems  to  me  one  of  the  great  things 
in  the  minds  of  people  to-day  in  the  anticipation  of  the 
future  is  the  great,  rich,  solemn  fear  which  anticipates  the 
great  future  with  anxiety  because  it  sees  the  larger  forces 
which  are  going  to  work  there. 

It  is  impossible  for  us  to  look  into  a  child's  face  to- 
day and  not  think  of  the  fifty  years  in  which  that  child 
is  to  live,  if  its  life  shall  be  spared  to  fulfil  the  normal 
length  of  human  life  upon  earth,  of  the  great  forces  that 
are  coming  into. existence,  the  great  powers  that  are  tak- 
ing possession  of  this  earth  both  in  its  physical  and 
moral  and  spiritual  life,  the  great  powers  that  are  shaking 
the  old  systems,  so  that  we  see  that  whatever  is  to  come 
upon  the  world,  the  old  systems  have  had  their  day  and 
are  ceasing  to  be,  and  something  new  is  to  come.  There 
is  electricity  in  the  air  that  those  of  the  future  are  to 
breathe,  dynamite  in  the  soil  over  which  they  are  to  tread, 
deeper  forces  stirring  all  that  soil,  changing  the  most  ab- 
solute conclnsions  of  human  life,  everything  that  seems 
most  settled  being  disorganized,  questions  that  seemed 


THE   CHILDREN'S  AID   SOCIETY.  501 

forever  closed  being  opened.  It  is  impossible  tliat  men 
shall  look  forward  without  fear.  The  man  simpl}^  de- 
clares himself  an  animal,  the  man  simply  declares  himself 
incapable  of  thoughtful  anticijiation,  who  does  not  look 
forward  into  the  days  that  immediately  are  to  be  and  the 
days  that  lie  further  off,  and  feel  a  great,  deep  anxiety. 

It  is  not  a  cruel  thing,  it  is  not  a  base  thing,  it  is  not 
a  thing  for  which  a  man  dare  to  be  ashamed  for  a  mo- 
ment, that  something  that  realty  proves  him  a  man  makes 
him  anticipate  with  great  joy  that  which  he  at  the  same 
time  anticipates  with  great  anxiety.  This  world  so  Avon- 
derful  in  which  we  live,  it  is  impossible  for  any  man  to 
think  of  it  with  nobleness — it  is  impossible  for  any  man 
to  think  of  it  with  loftiness  and  not  at  the  same  time  to 
think  of  it  both  with  fear  and  hope.  We  rejoice  in  the 
great  forces  that  are  ever  taking  possession  of  it.  We 
rejoice  that  the  years  to  come  are  going  to  be  greater  than 
the  years  that  have  been,  and  yet  we  know  that  in  them 
there  is  much  that  threatens  danger.  The  man  who  lives 
in  this  world  without  a  sense  of  danger  lives  but  an  ani- 
mal and  a  brutal  life.  The  man  who  lives  in  this  world 
"without  a  sense  of  danger  lives  also  without  a  sense  of 
opportunity,  for  in  every  world  of  God  that  we  have  ever 
known  the  two  are  absolutely  bound  together,  and  it  is 
impossible  to  separate  tliem  from  each  other.  Now,  one 
of  the  things  which  impresses  itself,  it  seems  to  me,  is  that 
this  perpetual  sense  which  we  see  in  every  thoughtful  face 
and  recognize  in  every  thoughtful  mind,  that  sense  of  dan- 
ger in  the  days  to  be,  has  also  a  strange  beauty.  The 
recuiTence  of  evils  permanent  and  eternal  promotes  the 
strongest  human  life.  Men  do  not  know  what  the  effect 
of  these  new  elements  will  be,  and  therefore  they  are  being 
thrown  back  again,  as  they  never  perhaps  have  been,  cer- 
tainly not  for  many  generations  before,  upon  the  simplest 
and  most  primal  forces  of  human  life,  certain  that  in  them, 


502  ESSAYS  AXB  ADDRESSES. 

however  impossible  it  may  be  for  any  man,  however  wise 
he  is,  to  anticipate  their  apphcation,  in  them  must  lie  the 
real  safety  of  Iniman  life  in  the  dangers  in  which  it  is 
going  to  be  launched  forth  on  that  new  century  whose 
brink  we  have  almost  reached.  We  come  back  to  those 
great,  everlasting,  primitive,  primal  things  which  must  be 
the  salvation  of  the  world  in  the  future  as  in  the  past. 

This  world  of  ours  may  have  this  great  characteristic, 
that  it  is  at  once  most  complicated  in  its  conception  of  life 
and  at  the  same  time  it  grows  more  and  more  to  put  great 
stress  and  value  upon  the  everlasting,  primal,  simplest 
things  of  human  life.  It  seems  to  me  all  this  comes  di- 
rectly into  ayjplication  with  that  which  we  are  thinking 
al)out  to-night.  The  world  is  to  be  full  of  complications 
which  we  cannot  read.  Wliat  is  to  keep  the  world  safe 
in  the  midst  of  all  these  dangers?  The  great,  everlast- 
ing, primal  things  underlying  history.  In  new  regions 
of  danger,  amid  forces  of  greater  comprehensiveness  than 
ever  before,  it  is  human  character.  It  is  the  simple  nature 
of  man,  known  in  his  divineness  as  the  child  of  God.  It 
is  the  relation  in  which  man  stands  in  intimate  affection 
and  in  perpetual  and  mutual  dependence  upon  his  fellow- 
man.  It  is  the  state  largely  organized  and  simplified  with 
the  great  idea  of  democracy  or  government  of  the  people. 
It  is  the  constitution  of  human  society  as  man  stands  most 
intimately  and  at  the  same  time  most  simply  related  to 
his  fellow-man.  It  is  the  family  made  more  noble  and 
divine  in  order  that  it  may  be  the  saving  element  of  the 
great  complications  of  the  future  even  more  than  it  has 
been  in  anj^  of  the  ages  of  the  past.  And  in  connection 
with  all  this  it  is  childhood  with  its  power  estimated,  its 
dignity  maintained,  its  critical  importance  made  manifest. 
With  the  care  for  every  human  creature  recognized  as  the 
duty  of  every  other  human  creature,  he  can  touch  any  hu- 
man creature  that  needs  care  with  his  help. 


THE   CHILDREN'S  AID   SOCIETY.  503 

This  seems  to  me  to  be  the  secret  of  the  whole  matter 
that  is  behind  the  fear  for  the  future,  tliat  great  proven 
faith  which  I  do  beheve  is  at  the  bottom  of  the  heart  of 
man  to-day  more  than  in  any  age  that  has  ever  passed, 
Jie  g-reat  proven  faith  in  the  simple,  primal  forces  of  hu- 
manity and  society,  the  government  of  the  family  and  of 
G-od,  They  are  going  to  be  the  preservation  of  the  future 
as  the}'  have  been  the  preservation  of  the  past.  Because 
the  bad  child  in  the  next  ten  years  is  going  to  be  capable 
of  doing  more  evil  than  the  bad  child  has  been  able  to  do 
in  any  past  years,  therefore  it  is  that  men  go  back  again 
and  fasten  themselves  upon  those  great  things  to  which 
they  have  sometimes  been  indifferent ;  therefore  it  is  that 
they  are  appealed  to  by  the  absolute  simplicity  of  a  society 
like  this.  What  is  it  that  it  is  trying  to  do  ?  Simply  to 
take  the  child  and  make  him  a  child  again.  Simply  to 
bring  him  back  to  those  days  of  bright,  sunny  innocence, 
of  the  freshness  of  human  life,  to  bring  him  back  again 
so  that  he  may  fulfil  the  first  period  of  human  life  and 
carry  forth  into  it  the  indestructible  power  with  which 
the  subsequent  periods  of  his  human  life  are  to  be  laid. 
Let  us  obey  the  great  inspiration  of  our  time.  Let  us  be 
afraid  for  the  future.  I;et  us  recognize  that  man  is  going 
in  upon  a  more  critical  period  of  his  existence  than  he  has 
ever  lived  in  before.  Let  us  rejoice  in  such  assurances, 
but  let  us  only  dare  to  rejoice  in  so  far  as  we  give  what 
strength  it  is  possible  for  us  to  inspire  in  these  gi"eat 
preservative  forces  which  ever  have  been  and  ever  must 
be  the  salvation  of  the  world. 

The  power  of  a  generation,  just  think  what  it  is !  We 
sometimes  personify  generations  and  centuries.  The 
eighteenth,  the  seventeenth,  the  sixteenth  centuries,  to  the 
student  of  history,  stand  forth  distinct  and  clear.  We 
can  see  exactly  what  they  are.  We  can  look  into  their 
faces.     We  can  hear  the  tread  with  which  thev  move 


504  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

along"  tlie  stages  of  liistoiy.  So  it  is  with  every  genera- 
tion. It  has  its  personal  life.  It  has  its  personality, 
Wliat  this  society  is  trjdng  to  do,  in  other  words — for 
that  is  the  real  value  of  such  a  meeting  and  of  such  an 
organization  as  this — that  power  or  disposition  of  human 
nature  which  this  society  moves  in  a  small  way,  in  a 
little  degree,  is  the  solemn  i-esponsihility  of  generation 
for  generation.  Looking  at  it  in  a  large  wa}^,  I  think 
that  is  what  this  society  is  doing,  and  the  world  that  this 
society  represents.  It  is  doing  for  the  next  generation 
precisely  what  the  father  and  the  mother  do  for  the  child 
whose  life  they  have  brought  into  this  world,  and  whom 
they  are  to  leave  here  in  this  M^orld  after  they  have  passed 
away.  The  father  and  mother  build  the  home,  gather  the 
true  enjoyments  of  human  life,  and  provide  for  the  educa- 
tion of  the  child,  smooth  just  as  many  of  the  first  footsteps 
as  it  is  possible  to  make  plain,  and  only  dismiss  hiin  from 
their  care  when  the  time  comes  that  they  must  pass  away 
to  higiier  worlds,  and  must  leave  him  here  to  fight  the 
battles  and  meet  the  experiences  of  life.  Generation  does 
that  for  generation  just  as  the  father  or  mother  does  it 
for  the  child.  This  which  ^^'e  are  doing  is  simply  the 
manifest  exj)ressiou  of  that  sense  of  responsibihty  and 
privilege  which  belong  to  a  generation  as  it  sends  forth 
the  next  generation  into  life.  The  work  is  going  on 
through  all  our  homes.  Everywhere  where  children  are 
being  educated  by  the  sweet,  natural  influences  of  father- 
hood and  motherhood  the  next  generation  is  being  fitted 
for  its  work.  He  who  trains  a  little  child  in  the  house- 
hold is  doing  something  more  than  simply  making  an  heir 
for  his  property  and  a  jjerpetuator  of  his  fame.  He  is 
building  also  part  of  that  great  human  life  that  is  to  come 
after  this  special  little  bit  of  human  life  in  which  we  have 
been  living.  Here  are  fragments,  waifs  and  strays  cast 
aside.     We  will  bring  them  also  and  incorporate  them 


TEE   CHILDREN'S  AID   SOCIETY.  505 

into  the  power  of  tliat  generation  which  is  to  come  after 
ourselves.  Poor  is  the  life  of  any  man,  poor  is  the  gen- 
eration of  mankind  that  says,  '■'■  We  care  not  what  comes 
after  we  are  gone."  It  is  a  beautiful  provision  of  Him 
who  made  not  merely  individual  but  corporate  and  con- 
tinuous human  life,  that  man  may  care  for  that  which  is 
to  come  after  hun,  that  the  father  and  mother  may  care 
for  their  child,  that  the  generation  may  care  for  the  gen- 
eration that  is  to  be ;  and  so  when  you  pick  the  child  out 
of  the  gutter,  and  when  you  lead  down  the  httle  child  from 
the  court-room  where  he  has  been  condemned  for  a  crime 
whose  name  and  nature  he  can  hardh^  understand,  you  are 
helping  to  build  that  future  whose  reflex  power  is  adding 
the  richest  and  loftiest  power  to  the  present  life  which 
we  are  living  now. 

It  seems  to  me  he  that  acts  for  childhood  is  in  a  large 
sense  acting  for  humanity,  he  is  acting  with  such  bright 
hope.  I  believe  in  every  good  institution.  I  believe  in 
the  institutions  wliere  old  men  are  gathered  at  the  end 
of  their  lives  that  the  last  lapping  of  the  wave  upon  the 
beach  may  be  calm  in  the  twilight,  however  the  tmnult 
of  the  storm  may  have  been  raging  out  at  sea.  It  is  all 
beautiful,  the  softening  of  the  ends  of  life,  and  it  is  not 
destitute  of  hope  to  him  Avho  believes  that  every  life  that 
fails  most  here  opens  into  some  new  opportunity  beyond 
the  stars.  But  surely  there  is  a  supreme  presence  of 
hopefulness  when  we  are  alile  to  take  him  in  whom  the 
years  of  the  future  lie  yet  unopened,  him  who  has  not  3'et 
inanifested  the  thing  that  is  in  him,  when  we  are  able  to 
take  him  and  stock  his  life  with  strength  from  our  life,  to 
free  it  from  hiudi'ances,  and  say,  "  Go  forth,  and  be  the 
thing  God  made  yow.  to  be."  It  is  a  rich  sense  of  the 
niysterj'  of  human  being,  simple  and  distinct  in  itself, 
that  seems  to  me  to  be  a  wonder  that  groAvs  on  us  the 
longer  we  live,  and  makes  this  world  so  beautiful  that 


506  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

we  dread  with  every  anticipation  the  time  when  we  shall 
be  called  to  go  away  from  it.  We  talk  abont  the  mys- 
tery of  the  great  men  who  have  manifested  the  splendid 
powers  of  om*  human  life  in  their  snpremest  exhibi- 
tion. We  talk  about  Martin  Luther  and  William  Shake- 
speare. We  say  how  mj'sterious  they  are.  Well,  the  mys- 
tery is  not  in  their  greatness.  The  mystery  is  in  their 
commonness.  The  mystery  is  in  their  humanity.  The 
poorest  little  waif  upon  your  streets,  the  poorest  little 
ruffian  that  steals  at  the  cart-tail,  there  is  a  mystery  about 
him  which,  when  you  look  at  him,  baffles  philosophers 
and  laughs  philosophy  to  scorn.  Ask  this  little  creature 
on  the  street  what  it  was  he  was  doing  j^esterday.  He 
says  he  remembers  yesterday  he  went  to  West  Philadel- 
phia or  he  went  to  Camden.  Do  you  take  in  the  infinite 
mystery  there  is  about  that?  What  is  it  for  that  little 
creature  to  remember?  Where  has  been  stowed  away 
that  experience  of  yesterday  which  now  he  brings  up  and 
hands  as  if  it  were  a  billet  out  of  his  pocket  to  show  to 
me  f  Mystery  that  with  all  thinking  and  dreaming,  Avith 
all  singing  and  prophesying,  men  are  no  nearer  to  to-day 
than  they  were  when  the  first  men  were  puzzled  by  the 
everlasting  inystery  of  human  life.  Now,  to  touch  that 
mysteiy  in  its  childhood,  to  touch  that  mystery  before  it 
is  poured  into  the  specific  and  different  ways  of  life  which 
it  is  going  to  manifest  by  and  by,  to  take,  not  the  doctor 
nor  the  merchant,  not  the  young  student  nor  the  young 
criminal,  but  him  in  whom  there  is  simply  the  absolute 
humanity,  him  in  whom  there  is  human  life  undivided 
and  unnamed,  simple  human  life. 

He  who  helps  a  child  helps  humanity  with  a  distinctness, 
with  an  immediateness,  which  no  other  help  given  to  human 
creatures  in  any  other  stage  of  their  human  life  can  possibly 
give  again.  He  who  puts  his  blessed  influence  into  a  river 
blesses  the  land  to  which  that  river  is  to  flow:  but  he 


THE   CHILDREN'S  AID   SOCIETY.  507 

who  puts  liis  iuflueuce  into  the  fountain  where  the  river 
comes  out  puts  his  influence  €ver;y"Avhere.  No  land  it  may 
not  reach.  No  ocean  it  may  not  make  sweeter.  No  bark 
it  may  not  bear.  No  wheel  it  may  not  turn.  Sometimes 
we  get  at  things  best  by  their  contraries.  Learn,  my 
friends,  the  rich  beauty  of  helping  a  child  by  the  awful- 
ness  of  hurting  a  child.  The  thing  men  have  always 
shuddered  at  most,  the  thing  men  have  seemed  to  recog- 
nize as  marking  the  deepest  and  most  essential  meanness 
of  human  nature,  is  hurting  a  child ;  hurting  a  child  even 
in  liis  physical  frame,  so  that  he  weeps,  shrieks,  and  cries ; 
hurting  him  still  more  in  soul  and  in  mind.  The  thing 
that  made  the  Divine  Master  indignant  as  He  stood  there 
in  Jerusalem  was  that  He  dreamed  of  seeing  before  Him 
a  man  who  had  harmed  some  of  these  little  ones,  and  He 
said  of  any  such  ruffian,  "  It  were  better  for  him  that  he 
never  had  been  born."  If  it  is  such  an  awful  thing  to 
hurt  a  child's  life,  to  aid  a  child's  life  is  beautiful. 

I  sometimes  think  how  it  would  be  if  midtitude  were  tak- 
en away  aud  we  saw  in  its  simplicity  that  which  often  loses 
itself  in  the  large  variety  in  which  it  is  manifested  to  us. 
vSuppose  there  were  but  one  needy  child  in  all  the  world. 
Suppose  every  child  from  China  to  Pei'u  were  wrapped  in 
the  soft  care  and  tender  luxury  which  belong  to  children 
in  their  parents'  arms.  Suj^pose  every  babe  were  cooing 
itself  to  rest  in  its  mother's  embrace,  and  everj-  little  boy 
were  looking  up  into  the  face  of  a  father's  syinpathy  for 
the  first  manifestation  of  a  truth  that  was  to  make  him 
strong.  Then  suppose  that  somewhere,  anywhere  upon 
our  earth,  there  came  one  cry  of  a  poor,  MTonged,  needy 
child.  Can  you  not  be  sure  that  all  humanity  would  lift 
itself  up  aud  never  be  satisfied  until  that  child  was  aided  ? 
Is  it  less  pathetic,  is  it  less  appealing,  because  they  are 
here  by  the  million  instead  of  one  or  two  ?  If  one  of  those 
little  creatures  that  the  doctor  read  to  us  about  had  stood 


508  jfiSSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

alone  in  all  the  generations  of  humanity,  how  infinitely 
pathetic  it  would  have  been !  How  you  all  would  have 
stood  up  and  said,  "Where  is  that  child f  Where  is  that 
child?  Life  shall  not  be  life  to  us  until  we  have  reheved 
it,  until  those  poor  limbs  have  been  straightened  and  those 
arms  made  strong,  until  those  bleared  eyes  have  been 
taught  to  see,  and  that  voice  has  sung  some  of  the  fii'st 
beginnings  of  the  song  of  life."  Well,  there  are  hundreds 
and  thousands  and  millions  of  them.  They  look  up  to 
you  from  the  gutter  as  you  walk  the  street.  They  look 
into  the  face  of  the  good,  kind  judge  as  he  sits  upon  his 
bench.  They  come  stretching  out  their  poor  sick  arms 
to  the  doctors  in  the  hospitals,  and  you  can  help  them. 
You  can  help  them.  Help  them  just  as  you  would  if 
there  were  only  one  of  them,  by  giving  your  sympathy, 
your  blessing,  your  loud  praise,  and  your  large  contribu- 
tions to  the  Cliildren's  Aid  Society. 


TWO   HUNDRED   AND  SEVENTY-SECOND  ANNI- 
VERSARY OF  THE  LANDING   OF   THE 
PILGRIMS. 

(New  England  Society,  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.,  December  21,  1892.) 

Brother  New-Englanders  :  I  bring  yon  most  cordial 
gi-eeting  from  New  England.  It  is  indeed  a  privilege  to 
be  allowed  to  bring  a  greeting  from  sucli  a  mother  to  such 
sons  who  have  gathered  around  her  for  love  during  these 
festal  days.  We  left  her  this  morning,  some  of  us  who 
love  her,  for  the  sake  of  being  here  with  you  this  evening, 
resting  there  in  the  same  familiar  beauty  "with  which  you 
have  known  her  aU  your  life  ;  looking  back  upon  her  past, 
as  she  opened  her  eyes  upon  her  birthday,  with  the  same 
old  spirit,  the  same  perpetual  sense  of  duty,  and  the  same 
expectation  that  every  one  of  her  children  shall  do  his 
duty,  which  she  gathered  from  the  old  land  from  which 
she  came  and  which  she  has  given  down  to  all  her  chil- 
dren. Truly  it  is  good  thus  to  come  from  every  part  of 
New  England  with  the  quick  speed  which  belongs  to  these 
modern  days,  and  to  stop  here  among  these  happy  exiles 
and  to  see  them  by  the  waters  of  their  Babylon,  with  their 
harps  taken  down  from  the  trees,  trying  to  sing  the  Lord's 
song  in  a  strange  land;  bearing  in  mind  that  if  they  re- 
member not  Jerusalem  in  their  mirth  their  tongues  wiU 
cleave  to  the  roofs  of  their  mouths.  Our  thoughts  turn 
Bibleward,  because  we  are  speaking  of  Bible  men.  There 
is  one  word  in  the  New  Testament  which  seems  as  if  it 

509 


510  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

were  a  g^reetina:  wliich  one  wants  to  bring  to-niglit.  It  is 
the  beginning  of  one  of  the  great  epistles,  that  of  James, 
"  to  the  Twelve  Tribes  which  are  scattered  abroad,"  which 
is  a  proper  greeting :  be  snre  that  if  you  never  forget  New 
England,  New  England  will  never  forget  yon. 

And  she  rejoices  perpetually  not  simph^  in  that  which 
lies  behind,  but  in  that  which  lies  before ;  in  the  anticipa- 
tion of  what  her  children  are  to  do,  in  the  knowledge  of 
what  her  children  are  doing,  all  through  the  land,  all 
through  the  world.  I  am  quite  sure  that  if  I  looked  over 
the  series  of  speeches  which  fortunate  men  have  been 
privileged  to  make  on  these  occasions,  I  should  find  two 
strains  pervading  them  all :  one  of  rejoicing  that  they 
themselves  inherit  and  keep  alive  perpetuall}^  the  spirit 
and  blood  of  Puritanism;  and  the  other  of  congratula- 
tion that  Puritanism  had  gone  aln'oad  bej'^ond  themselves 
and  was  impregnating  with  the  largest  life  and  the  best 
thoughts  the  action  of  the  world.  The  first  of  these  we 
can  never  forget.  I  can  imagine  how  a  great  man's  sons 
must  feel.  I  can  imagine  how  the  childi*en  of  Shakespeare, 
the  children  of  Milton,  the  childi'en  of  Webster,  and  the 
children  of  Lowell  must  feel  when  they  find  that  what 
has  been  familiar  to  them  all  their  days  has  been  taken  up 
and  made  the  heritage  and  possession  of  all  the  world ; 
not  merely  as  creatures  belonging  to  the  great  human 
race,  not  merely  as  those  who  have  to  do  with  all  the  life 
of  humanity,  but  as  those  who  have  been  bound  to  that 
personality  in  their  own  association,  do  they  rejoice  in  the 
fame  and  character  and  in  the  undying  memor}^  of  him 
whom  the  world  honors  and  who  is  especially  and  pecu- 
liarly theirs.  So  we  feel  about  Puritanism.  It  is  the 
world's,  but  it  is  peculiarly  ours.  We  have  our  own  per- 
sonal associations  with  it ;  we  have  the  legends  of  our 
ancestr}^,  and  the  stories  of  our  homes  are  full  of  that 
spirit  which  is  more  and  more  pervading  the  life  of  all 


THE  LANDING    OF   THE   PILGRIMS.  511 

the  world.  The  great  step  that  shakes  the  substance  of 
the  earth  as  it  moves  on  its  way  has  shaken  the  rafters 
of  the  honse  in  which  we  Hve.  The  voices  to  whicli  we 
listen  to-day  sang-  the  lullaby  which  soothed  us  to  sleep. 
In  the  power  of  its  spirit  Puritanism  has  gone  and  is  to 
go  more  and  more ;  but  there  is  coming  to  us  a  deeper 
sense  of  how  good  it  is  that  we  ourselves  belong  in  the 
very  heart  of  it  and  have  it  peculiarly  for  our  own.  For 
it  is  to  be  found  not  simply  in  the  legends  of  our  history 
and  in  the  traditional  stories  of  onr  homes,  but  we  feel  it 
in  our  blood.  There  is  some  compensation  in  a  man's 
growing  older  when  he  knows  that  he  is  holding  out  to 
other  men  those  conditions  of  his  life  which  show  the 
more  clearly  in  him  the  older  he  grows.  There  is  not  one 
of  us  who  does  not  find  the  Puritan  in  some  of  the  worst 
and  most  malign  aspects  of  his  life;  but  the  Puritan 
also  ennobles,  manifesting  himself  the  better  the  older  he 
grows.  We  see  his  spirit  even  in  the  faces  of  the  chil- 
dren, and  in  their  clothes,  and  in  their  character,  which 
they  have  inherited  from  their  ancestors,  and  we  rejoice 
in  it  all.  We  see  it  strongly  in  men  who  have  sprung 
from  the  stock  which  first  belonged  to  the  Puritans ;  in 
the  conceptions  and  in  the  ideas  which  they  had  when 
they  li\'ed  upon  the  eai'th,  in  the  days  which  are  pecu- 
liarl}'  stamj)ed  with  their  histor}'.  It  shows  itself  in  mul- 
titudes of  wa.}'s ;  it  shows  itself  iii.  the  way  in  which  tlie 
Puritan  is  always  a  disappointing  man.  He  seems  to  be 
a  selfish  creatm-e,  he  seems  to  be  a  harmless,  self -centered 
creature;  but  there  is  always  showing  itself  out  of  the 
depths  of  Puritanism  perpetually  the  great  public  spirit 
which  meddles  with  the  things  of  all  the  earth,  and  which 
will  show  its  force  when  that  force  is  called  for.  It  stands 
like  a  rusty  gun  in  a  corner  of  the  room ;  but  let  no  man 
ever  fool  with  Puritanism,  thinking  the  thing  is  not  loaded, 
for  by  and  by  it  will  go  off.     It  is  the  essential  positive- 


512  ESSAYS  AND   ADDEESSES. 

uess  of  the  thing  that  has  force  and  life  that  is  going-  to 
show  itself  whenever  needed.  We  should  all  rejoice  in 
Puritanism,  and  in  our  own  personal  association  with 
Puritanism,  and  bear  its  marks  upon  us  as  we  bear  its 
signs  and  traditions  in  our  Ijlood.  I  suppose  the  real 
prooi  that  we  are  Puritans  is  that  Ave  are  proud  of  being 
Puritans ;  which  nobody  but  a  Puritan  would  be. 

Pui'itanism  is  expressing  itself  through  all  the  life  of 
all  the  world.  Just  see :  when  we  look  back  into  the  sev- 
enteenth century  it  seems  as  if  we  were  looking  to  those 
days  of  Pui-itanism  when  the  world  gathered  its  forces 
for  a  new  departure.  Out  of  the  great  fountain  of  the 
seventeenth  century  the  great  springs  of  modern  life  have 
flowed,  and  they  open  themselves  more  and  more  as  the 
centuries  go  on.  What  forces  seem  to  be  working  in  the 
world  to-day !  You  can  trace  them  far  back.  As  you 
do  so  they  all  seem  to  find  theii"  origin  and  combination 
in  the  seventeenth  century,  from  which  they  spread  them- 
selves abroad  to  work  in  the  world,  and  which  has  been 
in  the  development  of  those  forces  which  then  started, 
when  Puritanism  was  the  very  heart  and  core  of  their  life. 
We  may  recount  in  the  simple  names  of  the  first  Puritans 
the  watchwords  of  the  times  in  which  they  lived.  What 
have  they  done  °?  These  things  are  now  perfectly  familiar 
to  us ;  they  are  the  watchwords  of  the  people.  They  are  : 
first,  religious  liberty.  Religions  liberty  sprung  up  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  and  it  has  lived  ever  since.  Next, 
popular  government;  the  right  of  the  people  to  govern 
themselves  led  up  to  and  into  Abraham  Lincoln's  "  gov- 
ernment of  the  people,  by  the  people,  and  for  the  people." 
Tliird,  popular  education,  so  that  no  man  is  counted  too 
poor  to  know  the  best  things  in  the  universe  of  God ;  and 
every  man  is  poorer  just  in  proportion  as  he  fails  to  know 
the  truth  of  which  the  world  is  full.  And  last,  trustee- 
ship of  the  world,  and  especially  of  the  land  and  country 


THE  LANDING    OF  THE  PILGRIMS.  513 

in  which  a  nation  lives.  Those  are  the  foui-  things  that 
have  made  the  modern  history  of  the  whole  world,  and 
especially  the  modern  history  of  America,  because  here 
has  been  the  livest  life  of  all  the  world  during  these  two 
hundred  years. 

I  look  back  to  the  old  Book  with  which  the  Puritan 
was  so  familiar,  from  which  he  drew  the  types,  the  pat- 
terns, and  the  foi'ms  from  which  his  ideas  were  always 
shaping  themselves.  The  Book  was  always  before  his 
mind.  In  the  picture  of  the  second  chapter  of  the  majes- 
tic Book  in  which  his  whole  life  lived,  there  is  the  repre- 
sentation of  that  which  his  life  was  to  be,  the  life  of  the 
world  that  was  to  come  after  him.  There  was  always 
before  him  that  old  picture  of  the  Book  of  Genesis,  and 
those  simple  words  in  which  it  was  recorded  for  him,  as 
for  us,  that  "  out  of  the  Garden  of  Eden  there  came  forth 
a  river" — a  watered  garden — and  from  thence  it  was 
parted  and  divided  into  four  heads,  like  a  Puritan  sermon. 
It  embodied  the  Puritan  life ;  and  the  great  river  Avas 
divided  into  four  heads  :  Pison,  Gihon,  Hiddekel,  and  Eu- 
phrates, and  went  into  possession  of  the  world  in  all  its 
various  forms.  The  first  great  river  which  went  forth 
was  that  of  religious  liberty,  which  laid  hold  of  the  deep- 
est life  of  man  and  realized  that  liberty  for  the  feeblest 
child  of  God.  Then  the  river  of  popular  government  went 
forth.  Then  there  was  another  river  which  went  forth 
reaching  for  the  knowledge  of  all  that  is  knowable.  Then 
another  issue  came,  the  trusteeship  of  the  land,  the  occu- 
pation of  it  for  a  moment  by  any  race,  until  they  should 
fill  it  with  a  fuller  and  completer  life ;  because  the  land 
is  the  responsibilit}'  for  the  whole  human  race,  of  any  gen- 
eration and  any  nation  for  the  period  in  which  it  lives. 

Now,  my  friends,  I  know  how  easy  it  is  to  look  back  in 
our  history  and  claim  those  great  principles  which  spring 
forth  from  Puritanism.     I  know  how  the  religious  liberty 


514  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

of  tlie  men  in  Pljonoiitli  was  nnder  perpetual  litigation, 
and  that  they  never  freed  themselves  from  the  lives  against 
which  they  themselves  rebelled.  I  know  how  popular 
government  was  always  haunted  by  the  spirit  of  aristoc- 
racy which  had  preceded  it.  I  know  how  the  search  for 
truth  was  forever  hampered  by  the  preconception  which 
it  seemed  must  forever  rest  upon  the  human  mind,  and 
which  could  never  let  it  become  absolutely  free.  I  know 
how  the  possession  of  the  land  for  the  moment  seems 
again  and  again  to  give  the  right  of  absolute  possession 
to  every  one  who  takes  up  his  residence  within  it.  And 
never  yet  have  our  Puritans  themselves  appreciated  the 
fulness  of  the  life  they  embody.  But  it  is  out  of  that  Gar- 
den that  the  river  of  Eden  has  flowed  off  in  its  four 
branches,  Pison  and  Gilion  and  Hiddekel  and  Euphrates, 
which  is  more  and  more  taking  possession  of  the  world. 

It  seems  to  me,  my  friends,  most  seriously  on  such  an 
occasion  as  this,  that  the  great  question  of  our  time  is 
this :  How  do  these  four  great  principles  stand  in  the 
conceptions  of  mankind "?  What  is  the  power  which  they 
have  gained  for  themselves  ?  What  force  do  they  assume 
over  the  nation's  heart  to-day?  That  is  the  question 
which  men  are  forever  going  to  ask  when  they  gather,  as 
on  this  occasion,  as  Puritans.  Where  do  religious  liberty, 
popular  government,  universal  education,  and  the  trustee- 
ship of  the  world  for  the  future  stand  in  the  conception 
of  the  coming  generation  ?  I  do  not  think  I  can  misin- 
terpret the  time,  or  the  view  you  take  of  it,  when  I  say, 
with  regard  to  every  one  of  these  great  principles,  that 
there  is  to-day  upon  the  minds  of  men  a  certain  strange 
sense  of  disappointment.  There  is  a  misgiving  with  re- 
gard to  every  one  of  them.  There  is  a  misgiving  with  re- 
gard to  religious  liberty,  lest  it  should  go  too  far.  There 
is  also  a  doubt  with  regard  to  popular  government  in  the 
minds  of  men ;  there  is  a  certain  disposition  to  feel  dis- 


THE  LANDING    OF   THE  PILGRIMS.  515 

trust  in  universal  suffrage,  tlie  great  charter  of  our  exis- 
tence, the  life-blood  of  our  life.  There  is  a  certain  dispo- 
sition in  the  heart  of  man  to  have  deep  misgivings  with 
regard  to  universal  education,  as  to  whether  it  may  not 
be  so  broad  that  men  may  be  unfitted  for  the  work  which 
they  have  to  do  in  the  world,  and  whether  we  may  not 
have  to  close  our  school-doors  and  close  our  school-books 
that  have  been  once  opened.  There  is  a  doubt  with  re- 
gard to  the  trusteeship  with  which  every  nation  and  every 
age  holds  the  earth  on  which  it  lives  for  all  humanity  and 
for  the  posterity  that  is  to  come,  and  by  which  it  is  to 
make  it  fit  for  the  purposes  of  its  trust  and  fit  to  bestow 
the  great  life  which  is  in  it  for  the  blessing  of  mankind. 
Is  there  not  a  sense  of  disappointment,  to-day,  haunting 
the  thoughts  of  very  many  thoughtful  menf  Is  it  not 
good  for  us,  the  sons  of  the  Puritan  builders,  Puritans 
ourselves,  to  tliink  of  this  great  misgiving  in  many  people's 
minds,  and  to  insist  that  these  are  the  great  principles 
which  were  in  the  Puritans'  blood  which  has  flowed  forth 
in  the  centuries,  and  that  these  are  the  truths  through 
which  we  must  live  in  all  the  ages  that  are  to  come  ? 

There  are  several  kinds  of  disappointment.  There  is  the 
disappointment  which  looks  back,  and  there  is  the  disap- 
pointment which  looks  forward  and  presses  continually 
onward.  There  is  the  disappointment  which  sees  the  evil 
of  that  which  it  has  trusted,  and  would  fling  it  away  be- 
cause the  light  is  too  rich  and  blinding  for  human  eyes 
to  bear.  That  is  the  disappointment  of  despair.  There 
is  a  disappointment  which  is  full  of  inspiration,  which 
sends  the  disappointed  man  deeper  into  the  heart  and  soul 
of  the  thing  which  he  has  begun  to  distrust  and  in  regard 
to  which  he  has  had  misgivings,  and  which  makes  him 
study  it  more  deeply;  which  makes  him  believe  it  with 
deeper  faith,  and  more  and  more,  so  far  as  in  him  lies, 
bring  it  to  its  fullest  application.     Our  people  are  never 


516  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

going  to  cease  to  believe  in  those  four  great  powers  which 
have  come  forth  out  of  the  Puritan  life.  Religious  liberty, 
in  order  that  it  should  have  its  full  power,  should  be  made 
not  the  destroyer  but  the  nurse,  and  the  producer,  of  an 
intense  personal  conviction,  without  which  it  can  never 
be  complete.  And  a  great  government  of  the  people 
by  the  peoj^le  must  be  impregnated  with  a  strict  sense  of 
duty ;  a  people  governing  themselves  must  know  the  duty 
which  belongs  to  the  principle  of  its  government.  And 
we  do  not  doubt  that  our  system  of  public  education  will 
have  to  be  revised  and  reconstructed  so  that  what  a  man 
ought  to  know  shall  be  accessible.  And  then,  through 
popular  education  for  all  men,  there  can  be  brought  to 
our  knowledge  the  great  purpose  and  ideal  which  must  be 
set  before  us — the  trusteeship  of  our  land  for  all  human- 
ity. We  are  never  going  to  lose  that  conception ;  it  may 
be,  it  must  be,  in  order  that  we  may  make  our  land  the 
blessing  that  it  should  be  to  all  the  world,  that  we  shall 
stand  guard  over  it  from  time  to  time.  It  may  be  that 
some  day  we  shall  receive  into  it  the  lives  of  the  oppressed, 
the  lives  of  the  degraded.  We  shall  exclude  them  for  the 
moment,  and,  it  may  be,  stand  guard  over  the  quantity  in 
order  that  we  may  make  more  sure  of  the  quality  of  that 
to  which  we  shall  welcome  all  the  world.  The  one  thing, 
it  seems  to  me,  that  we  ought  to  do  to-day  in  regard  to 
this  whole  matter  of  the  limitation  of  access  to  our  land, 
is  to  keep  the  true  principle  in  view  which  lies  behind  it 
all.  If  the  desire  be  to  hold  exclusively  for  our  own  inter- 
est, even  our  own  best  interest,  the  land  to  Avhich  our  lives 
have  come  first,  then  it  is  unworthy  of  the  way  in  which 
we  have  stood  before  the  world  for  these  past  generations. 
But  if,  more  than  that,  it  is  because  we  feel  so  profoundly 
the  trust  that  God  has  given  to  us  in  this  America  of  ours, 
that  we  desire  to  keej)  her  pure  and  to  receive  into  her 
that  which  she  has  abundant  power  to  assimilate,  so  that 


THE  LANDING    OF  THE  PILGRIMS.  517 

she  shall  be  able  forever  to  receive  into  a  higher  life,  a 
life  higher  than  theirs,  those  who  come  to  ns  out  of  the 
darkness  of  other  lands,  then  this  limitation  is  not  a  re- 
versal of  the  position  which  our  nation  has  assumed  in 
the  past,  that  we  are  the  home  of  the  oppressed ;  but  it  is 
simply  keeping  the  home  of  the  oppressed  so  that  the  oj)- 
pressed  may  come  to  her  and  shake  their  chains  off  upon 
the  beach  and  live  the  full  lives  of  intelligent  and  well- 
grown  citizens  within  her  borders. 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  one  great  thing  to  do  is  to  keep 
uj)  the  standards  of  our  national  life,  and  to  do  in  new 
ways  precisely  the  same  thing  which  it  has  been  necessary 
to  do  in  the  old  ways  in  other  days.  I  believe  that  those 
strange  gentlemen  who  play  at  baseball  have  a  way  in 
which  they  can  fling  a  ball  with  a  certain  knowledge,  that 
in  a  certain  direction,  at  a  certain  distance,  and  at  a  cer- 
tain moment,  that  ball  is  going  to  change  the  direction 
in  which  it  has  been  moving  to  another  direction  by  the 
same  force  which  they  imparted  to  it  at  first.  Whether  I 
am  right  al^out  that  or  not,  that  is  what  liistory  is  always 
doing :  sending  forth  her  impulse  with  the  certainty  that 
she  will  change  the  direction,  with  the  certainty  that  the 
impulse  will  be  the  same  in  the  new  direction  as  in  the 
old.  So  it  is  that  religious  liberty  and  popular  govern- 
ment should  never  be  restrained  out  of  temporary  fear. 
And  universal  education,  finding  the  deepest  and  truest 
substances  on  which  it  shall  feed  the  young,  and  the  best 
methods  by  which  the  food  shall  be  administered,  shall 
build  itself  deeper  and  higher,  and  the  school-doors  shall 
be  opened  wider  and  wider  as  the  years  go  on ;  and  the 
great  and  solemn  sense  of  a  trust  for  mankind  shall  grow, 
so  that  each  man  shall  know  that  the  ground  on  which  he 
stands  is  given  to  him  in  trust,  and  that  the  great  ocean, 
with  its  dancing  waves  and  rolling  tides,  was  given  to  him 
for  a  nol)le  and  universal  purpose  also.     When  we  feel 


518  i:SSA¥S  AXD  JDDEESSES. 

tliis,  then  we  are  able  to  gather  together  around  these 
festive  tables  under  circumstances  which  are  so  different 
from  those  which  greeted  our  ancestors  at  Plymouth,  and 
to  declare,  on  such  occasions  as  these,  that  Puritanism  is 
not  an  isolated  thing  in  the  world;  that  it  is  not  their 
simple  standing  in  history  that  we  are  going  to  admii'e  at 
a  distance.  What  the  world  needs  to-day  is  more  Puri- 
tanism, and  not  less  Puritanism.  It  is  our  growing  con- 
sciousness that  there  is  in  Puritanism  the  force  waiting 
at  the  door,  touching  the  springs  of  action  of  the  world 
at  all  times.  That  is  the  essential  and  eternal  Puritanism ; 
not  merely  the  memory  of  the  past,  but  the  presence  of 
the  sense  of  duty,  and  the  presence  of  God,  and  the  ever- 
lasting presence  of  the  ideal  in  the  lives  of  men,  in  the 
lives  of  nations,  and  in  the  lives  of  humanity,  of  Avhich 
we  make  a  part.  We  have  gone  so  far  away  from  l^uri- 
tanism  to-day  that  we  may  look  upon  it  as  a  mount,  stand- 
ing in  history.  We  can  see  how  great  it  was,  but  it  is  a 
very  poor  thing  if  we  simply  make  it  an  object  in  the  his- 
torical landscape.  The  rivers  coming  from  that  mount 
must  take  our  lives  into  their  torrent ;  must  make  us  re- 
joice in  the  past  be(.*ause  it  has  exhibited  itself  more  richly 
in  the  future  in  which  we  live  to-day.  And  all  the  while 
we  must  hear  what  these  Puritans  heard,  the  great  boom- 
ing and  rushing  of  the  sea  of  God,  the  sea  of  the  completed 
life  of  man,  moving  in  obedience  to  the  law  of  God,  in 
which  they  rejoiced  and  which  was  the  inspiration  of  theu' 
life  and  belief.  So,  embodied  in  the  past,  uttered  in  the 
present,  and  anticipating  the  future,  too  great  for  any 
man  to  know,  is  the  true  Puritanism.  Such  Puritans  may 
we  be ;  such  Puritans  I  think  we  are  to-night. 


THE  PUBLIC-SCHOOL   SYSTEM. 

Somewhat  to  the  surprise  of  many  people,  and  yet  as 
the  inevitable  result  of  causes  which  have  been  at  work 
ever  since  our  public-school  system  was  set  in  operation, 
that  system  is  now  the  subject  of  the  most  serious  ques- 
tionings, and  its  whole  future  is  such  as  no  man  can  con- 
fidently predict.  We  have  boasted  of  it  as  if  it  were 
almost  a  perfect  thing.  It  has  seemed  to  be  at  once  the 
most  fertile  root  and  the  most  beautiful  flower  of  our 
peculiar  civilization.  It  has  been  held  up  as  the  rebuke  and 
pattern  of  the  Old  World.  And  now,  almost  suddenly, 
we  hear  men  debating  whether  it  is  really  good  and  wise, 
and  whether,  if  it  is  not  seriously  reformed,  the  prosperity 
of  the  country  will  not  suffer. 

These  questionings  arise,  no  doubt,  in  part  from  the 
anxiety  with  which  men  are  looking  everywhere  and  ques- 
tioning everything  to  find  the  causes  for  the  patent  evils 
of  our  political  and  social  life.  But  they  are  partly  also 
the  ripened  utterance  of  misgivings  wdiose  seeds  have 
loug  lain  in  thoughtful  minds.  Whoever  deals,  however 
slightly,  with  the  subject  must  look  back  and  see  some- 
thing of  the  origin  of  the  state  of  things  in  which  we 
were  educated  and  under  which  we  live. 

The  common  statement  and  the  general  boast  of  Amer- 
icans has  been  that  in  our  American  polity  there  is  an 
entire  separation  of  Church  and  State.  But  nothing  can 
be  clearer  than  that  such  a  separation  was  very  far  from 

519 


520  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

the  thought  of  the  founders  of  many  of  the  colonies  from 
whose  union  our  nation  sprang.  Alike  in  Puritan  New 
Enghxnd,  in  orthodox  Pennsylvania  and  Delaware,  and  in 
the  churchly  South,  the  provinces  of  religion  and  govern- 
ment, though  not  counted  identical,  continually  overran 
each  other.  This  condition  of  things  lasted  until  the  Revo- 
lution, and  even  in  the  Declaration  of  Independence  a 
religious  basis  is  freely  claimed  for  the  newly  asserted 
rights.  When  the  Constitution  is  formed  all  appeal  to 
religion  disappears.  It  is  a  purely  secular  instrument, 
and  only  mentions  religion  to  declare  that  it  shall  be  for- 
ever excluded  from  an  influence  in  the  selection  of  the 
officers  of  government.  This  fact  was  owing,  doubtless, 
to  the  times  in  which  the  Constitution  was  drawn,  and  to 
the  fact  that  so  many  of  its  fi'amers  shared  in  the  spirit 
of  those  times.  But  from  then  until  now  the  theory  of 
our  general  government  has  been  wholly  secular. 

But  for  many  years  the  state  of  things  which  belonged 
to  our  earlier  history,  and  which  was  perpetuated  in  some 
of  our  State  governments,  preserved  a  presence  and  influ- 
ence of  religion  in  some  departments  of  our  life,  and  per- 
haps most  notably  of  all  in  the  department  of  our  educa- 
tion. Our  schools  had  been  in  their  foundation  closely 
united  to  the  churches.  The  same  men  who  built  the  one 
had  built  the  other,  and  as,  especiaU}^  in  New  England,  they 
had  valued  and  provided  for  intelligence  and  learning  in 
the  churches,  they  had  with  equal  care  preserved  and  pro- 
vided for  religion  in  the  schools. 

We  have,  then,  for  a  century  been  living  under  a  gov- 
ernment theoretically  secular,  and  3'et  that  government 
has  supported  a  public  education  in  which  religion  was  a 
recognized  and  enforced  element.  It  is  the  culmination  of 
this  incongruity  which  we  are  meeting  now.  So  long  as, 
with  all  the  formal  exclusion  of  religion,  the  mass  of  our 
people  were  of  essentially  similar  belief,  and  the  tone  of 


THE  PUBLIC-SCHOOL   SYSTEM.  S21 

religious  feeling  which  pervaded  our  life  modified  the 
administration  of  our  system  without  challenge,  all  went 
well ;  but  during  the  last  centmy  certain  slow  but  sure 
changes  have  taken  place.  First,  the  whole  conception 
of  life,  public  and  private,  has  grown  more  and  more 
secular ;  second,  our  population  has  become  mixed  by  im- 
migration with  immense  umnbers  of  people  of  quite  differ- 
ent religious  beliefs  from  those  of  our  first  citizens ;  thii'd, 
the  idea  of  toleration  and  the  rights  of  men  have  been 
immensely  developed,  and  latterly  the  new  methods  of 
political  action  have  made  it  less  possible  for  anything  to 
be  done  by  general  consent  or  by  local  law  which  is  not 
in  harmony  with  the  fundamental  theory  and  genius  of 
our  institutions.  Under  the  pressure  of  these  influences, 
the  religious  element  has  been  steadily  pushed  out  of  our 
system,  and  it  has  disappeared  from  our  educational  work, 
leaving  nothing  behind  except  the  practice  of  reading  a 
portion  of  the  Scriptures  at  some  of  the  exercises  of  our 
public  schools. 

I  claim  that  this  is  a  fair  statement  of  what  has  been 
going  on.  Our  public  schools  have  been  steadily  conform- 
ing themselves  to  the  secular  character  of  all  our  public 
institutions.  And  the  question  which  is  agitating  people's 
minds  now,  and  which  was  really  the  issue  of  the  last 
election  in  Ohio,  is  not  whether  the  pulilic  schools  shall 
be  secular  or  religious.  That  is  settled,  and  they  are  secu- 
lar. It  is  whether  a  certain  syml^ol  of  a  character  which 
they  once  j^ossessed  shall  be  retained  now  that  their  char- 
acter is  gone.  I  know  that  a  certain  positive  value  may 
be  given  to  it,  and  if  the  reading  of  the  Bible  be  per- 
formed by  a  religious  man  in  a  religious  spirit  it  may 
certainly  give  something  of  saeredness  and  consecration 
to  the  school  work  which  succeeds,  but  this  is  very  little, 
and  to  require  its  reading  by  teachers  who  have  been  ap- 
pointed to  their  places  with  no  reference  to  their  fitness 


522  ESSAYS  AXD  ADDRESSES. 

for  this  duty  is  surely  to  expose  the  sacred  Book  to  care- 
less treatment,  if  not  to  wantou  insult.  But  this,  I  think, 
is  not  the  ground  on  which  its  use  is  urged.  It  is  as  the 
assertion  of  a  religious  character  in  our  school  system. 
It  is  as  the  symbol  of  something  which  is  felt  to  be  so 
feeble  a  reahty  that  without  this  symbol  it  would  not  be 
recognized — of  something  which  has  really  passed  away. 
It  is  analogous  to  that  which  some  good  people  are  very 
anxious  to  secure,  the  insertion  of  the  name  of  God  in 
the  preamble  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States — 
and  is  subject  to  the  same  criticism  which  that  attempt 
suggests,  that  if  it  is  real  it  is  not  needed,  and  if  it  is 
needed  it  is  not  real. 

As  to  the  question  of  the  right  of  the  State  to  order 
the  use  of  the  Bible  the  case  seems  plain.  The  proper 
authority  may  command  the  subjects  to  be  taught  and 
the  books  from  which  instruction  shall  be  given  in  the 
public  schools.  If  they  choose  to  command  that  morals 
shall  be  included  in  the  course  of  teaching,  and  that  the 
Gospels  or  any  part  of  the  Bible  shall  be  the  text-book, 
they  have  the  perfect  right  to  do  so.  And  a  mere  protest 
of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  that  the  use  of  that  Book 
is  not  allowed  b}^  its  religion  is  of  no  more  weight  than 
if  it  blankly  asserted  that  the  Copernican  astronom^^  or 
the  science  of  geolog}^  or  the  accepted  theories  of  history 
were  Protestant  or  infidel  and  must  be  cast  aside.  Any 
religious  sect  with  any  arl3itrar3^  dogma  might  block  the 
education  of  a  whole  community. 

It  is  not,  then,  because  it  is  unjust  or  illegitimate,  but 
because  its  use  is  not  a  living  practice  but  a  dead  symbol, 
that  it  seems  right  to  yield  to  that  demand  for  the  disuse 
of  the  Bible  which  the  Roman  Catholics  and  others  urge 
so  strongly. 

And  then  what  will  our  schools  become '?  The  answer 
is,  first,  that  they  will  be  what  they  are  now.     A  symbol 


THE  PUBLIC-SCHOOL   SYSTEM.  523 

which  represents  no  reality  will  have  been  di'opped.  The 
schools  are  secular  ah-eady,  and  they  will  be  so  still.  No 
perceptible  difference  will  show  the  feeling.  The  schools 
of  Chicago,  where  the  Bible  is  not  read,  are  now  essen- 
tially like  the  schools  of  Boston,  where  its  use  is  still  en- 
forced. 

But  incidentally  a  plausible  pretense  of  grievance  will 
have  been  removed,  and  the  Catholic,  who  ever  since  the 
Papal  EueycUcal  of  1864,  however  it  may  previously  have 
been,  is  the  inevitable  and  irreconcilable  enemy  of  our 
whole  system,  will  be  compelled  to  put  his  opposition  on 
its  real  ground  and  blankly  state  the  only  remedy  which 
he  really  descries. 

But  still  the  secular  school  is  not  of  necessity  an  irre- 
Ugious  school.  President  Grant  is  not  very  clear  in  his 
mind  when  he  wants  to  forbid  "  the  teaching  in  said 
schools  of  religious,  atheistical,  or  pagan  tenets."  He 
would  have  a  school  where  it  shall  not  be  taught  that 
there  is  a  God,  nor  yet  that  there  is  not  a  God,  where  his- 
tory, for  instance,  shall  neither  have  a  Christian  nor  a 
pagan  exposition.  It  nuist  have  one  or  the  other.  And 
what  exposition  it  has,  what  color  it  receives,  -will  depend 
upon  the  current  thought  or  tone  of  the  community  in 
which  the  school  is  as  expressed  by  a  representative  man 
or  woman  as  the  teacher.  Again,  the  school  here  is  anal- 
ogous to  the  civil  government.  A  secular  government 
administered  in  Christian  lands  by  Christian  men  will  act 
on  Clu-istian  principles,  and  so  a  school  without  a  verse 
out  of  the  Bible,  in  a  Christian  city,  and  taught  by  Chi-is- 
tian  teachers,  will  be  in  a  true  sense  a  Christian  school, 
full  of  a  Christian  spirit.  I  have  kno"s^^l  teachers  in  our 
public  schools  who,  without  violating  in  the  least  the  let- 
ter or  the  spirit  of  the  laws  under  which  they  held  their 
post,  have  had  that  truly  Christian  influence  upon  their 
scholars  which  a  true  Christian  must  exercise  on  those 


524  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

with  whom  he  deals  in  the  most  secular  relations.  I 
would  rather  see  a  religious  teacher  in  a  secular  school 
than  an  irreligious  man  bound  to  the  most  punctilious 
performance  of  religious  rites.  The  school  is  the  most 
sensitive  point  of  the  community  after  the  family.  Per- 
haps it  even  precedes  the  Chiu'ch  in  this  regard,  and  there 
will  always  be  a  positive  strong  tendency  in  every  school 
to  catch  and  copy  the  tone  and  color  of  the  community 
where  it  is  set.  If  the  town  is  religious  so  its  public 
school  will  be.  If  the  town  is  pagan  its  public  school  will 
be  pagan  too,  in  spite  of  any  imposed  hereditary  cere- 
monies. 

If  this  be  all  true,  and  the  secular  character  be  thus 
stamped  upon  our  public  education,  then  the  question 
comes  right  to  the  root  of  things.  What  shaU  a  Chris- 
tian man  think  of  the  whole  matter?  How  shall  he  act? 
Is  the  public-school  system,  then,  a  blessing  or  a  curse  ? 
What  kind  of  education  shall  we  give  our  influence  to  help 
and  foster  ? 

And  there  are  really  three  alternatives,  three  plans  of 
education  which  alone  any  practical  man  can  contemplate 
as  possible.     Let  us  see  what  they  are. 

First,  it  is  conceivable  tliat  the  public  money  raised  by 
general  taxation  for  education  should  be  appropriated  in 
part  at  least  to  various  religious  bodies,  to  be  applied  by 
them  to  the  support  of  schools  under  their  own  manage- 
ment, with  more  or  less  of  government  supervision.  This 
is  what  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  is  really  seeking. 
This  is  what  to  some  extent  has  been  found  possible  in 
the  revised  educational  system  of  England,  but  there, 
although  the  experiment  has  not  been  tried  long  enough 
to  be  decisive,  it  has  already  develoj^ed  serious  difficulties, 
and  the  advocates  of  purely  secular  schools  are  becoming 
stronger  and  stronger.  With  us  the  obstacles  in  the  way 
of  such  a  project  seem  to  be  these.     The  body  who  would 


THE  PUBLIC-SCHOOL   SYSTEM.  525 

most  of  all  avail  themselves  of  it  are  the  Roman  Catholics, 
the  body  which  fui-uishes  to  the  country  the  largest  amount 
of  ignorance  and  the  smallest  amount  of  money.  It  would 
be  mainly  a  plan  for  educating  Roman  Catholic  children 
in  a  religion  whose  fundamental  tendencies  are  hostile  to 
the  first  ideas  of  our  republic,  and  would  abolish  at  once 
the  strongest  and  healthiest  of  influences  by  which  at 
present  the  juvenile  Irishman  and  Irishwoman  are  appro- 
priated and  assimilated  into  the  life  of  the  land  to  which 
a  mysterious  Providence  has  brought  them.  But  looking 
wider,  and  taking  in  all  the  denominations,  the  objections 
to  such  a  proposition  seem  to  be  three :  first,  it  would 
lower  the  standard  of  education,  for  the  religious  bodies, 
being  organized  and  governed  for  quite  other  purposes, 
are  not,  and  it  is  not  at  all  likely  that  they  could  be, 
adapted  to  the  work  of  thorough,  systematic  education ; 
secondly,  it  would  intensify  and  perpetuate  every  evil 
which  belongs  now  to  our  mass  of  sects,  creating  a  whole 
new  class  of  jealousies,  and  initiating  even  children  into 
the  spirit  which  we  dread  in  men  and  women ;  and  thirdly, 
it  would  drop  some  children,  probably  many,  out  alto- 
gether, through  the  gaps  and  joints  of  such  a  patchwork, 
and,  destroying  the  possibility  of  any  uniform  and  homo- 
geneous culture,  would  condemn  other  children  who  had 
the  misfortune  to  be  born  in  an  illiterate  sect  to  such  poor 
teaching  as  their  sect  thought  satisfactory. 

The  next  suggestion  would  be  that  all  public  provision 
for  education  should  be  abandoned,  that  there  should  be 
no  taxation  for  any  schools,  but  that  every  religious  body 
should  be  left  to  provide  as  it  thought  best  for  the  educa- 
tion of  its  own  children.  It  seems  as  if  no  practical  man, 
really  looking  at  the  facts  of  the  case,  could  give  his  vote 
to  such  a  plan  as  that.  Only  some  theorist,  who  took  the 
broad  ground  that  education  was  the  sacred  responsibility 
of  the  Church  alone,  with  which  the  State  had  no  right  to 


52G  ESSAYS  AND   ADDRESSES. 

meddle,  conld  be  its  advocate.  It  has  been  advocated  by 
two  such  different  theorists  as  the  Bisliop  of  Tennessee 
and  the  late  Mr.  Gerritt  Smith.  But  any  man  who  looks 
at  the  ability  which  the  Church  shows,  or  gives  us  any 
reason  to  expect  that  it  would  show,  to  support  such  schools 
as  we  require  sees  instantly  the  blank  impossibiUty.  There 
would  be  an  utter  absence  of  any  power  to  enforce  contri- 
butions. And  almost  all  the  evils  which  I  specified  under 
the  last  suggestion  are  just  as  certain  here.  The  Church 
and  society,  education  and  religion,  would  find  it  equally 
disastrous.  It  is  hard  to  say  which  it  would  harm  most. 
It  is  a  pretty  di-eam  for  some  town  rector  who  holds  up 
his  model  parish  school,  but  it  seems  as  if  even  his  mind 
must  be  appalled  when  he  compares  his  puny  machinery 
with  the  mass  of  ignorance  that  lies  grimly  defying  us  to 
turn  it  into  knowledge.  If  any  country  could  have  lived 
on  such  a  system  it  would  have  been  England,  with  her 
established  faith  and  her  traditions  and  her  wealth  and 
her  old  parish  schools.  And  in  the  establishment  of  the 
national-school  system  there  is  a  clear  confession  that  she 
could  not  rely  upon  spontaneous  religious  and  charitable 
provision  for  the  education  of  her  people. 

Of  both  these  plans  before  I  leave  them  let  me  say  that 
they  have,  besides  all  else  which  I  have  suggested,  the  in- 
herent vice  of  narrowness.  Much  as  we  love  our  Chm-ch, 
we  must  know  that  with  all  her  capacity  for  universality 
she  is  practically  and  at  present  partial.  She  represents 
only  certain  elements  out  of  the  whole  range  either  of  the 
general  human  or  the  special  American  life.  And  to  be 
trained  wholly  within  her  care  would  be  for  the  young 
American  to  lose  both  the  knowledge  of  and  the  share  in 
other  elements  which  would  add  to  the  richness  and  use- 
fulness of  his  life. 

Nothing  is  left,  then,  but  the  thii'd  possibility.  And 
what  is  that  ?     The  secular  school  pure  and  simple,  the 


THE   PUBLIC-SCHOOL   SYSTEM.  527 

scliool  where  the  Bible  is  not  read  nor  any  religious  in- 
struction given.  I  have  already  said  that  our  schools  are 
essentially  just  that  now.  That  they  are  destined  to  be- 
come that  more  and  more  is  perfectly  ine\itable.  Nobody 
but  King  Canute  or  Mrs.  Partington  would  attempt  to  stop 
the  tide.  And  taking,  as  I  have  tried  to  take,  everything 
into  the  account,  I  think  we  could  not  hesitate,  even  if 
the  choice  were  wholly  open,  to  prefer  this  prospect  to 
either  of  the  others. 

But  with  regard  to  this  manifest  destinj',  or  rather  this 
present  condition  of  our  public  schools,  there  are  one  or 
two  things  to  sa}'. 

First,  it  is  surely  not  a  condition  to  rejoice  in.  It  is 
not  a  great  trium]3h.  Rather  it  is  mortifying  and  distress- 
ing. It  is  full  of  anxious  forebodings.  It  is  a  witness  of 
the  failure  of  man  to  bring  his  Christianity  to  use  where 
it  is  most  needed.  It  is  the  weak  spot  in  our  secular  the- 
ory of  government.  It  is  a  sad  witness  of  the  sectarian 
condition  of  Christendom.  It  is  a  waiving,  not  an  answer- 
ing, of  the  hard  question.  And  President  Grant  is  ui-ging 
the  best  that  we  can  do,  but  not  by  any  means  the  best 
conceivable,  Avhen  he  l)ids  us  "leave  the  matter  of  religion 
to  the  family  altar,  the  Church,  and  the  private  school, 
supported  entirely  by  private  contril^utions."  We  accept 
his  policy  heartily,  but  we  cannot  cheer  over  it  when  w^e 
remember  the  multitudes  of  children  whom  no  religious 
influence  fi'om  family  or  Church  ever  reaches,  but  wlio  are 
gathering  in  our  secular  schools  a  knowledge  and  bright- 
ness which  without  moral  principle  must  be  the  ruin  of  a 
state  Hke  ours. 

And  again,  one  result  of  the  distinct  recognition  of  the 
purely  secular  character  of  our  public  schools  must  be  in 
the  withdrawal  of  many  children  whose  parents  insist 
upon  religion  being  mingled  with  their  instruction.     It 


528  ESSAYS  AND  ADDRESSES. 

can  only  be  seen  in  time  how  large  such  a  withdrawal 
may  be,  and  how  it  may  affect  the  stabihty  of  the  whole 
system  by  weakening-  the  interest  in  it  of  those  people  in 
the  community  without  whose  moral  support  and  sympa- 
thy it  cannot  stand. 

And  yet,  again,  the  question  comes  at  once  to  Christian 
people  and  the  Christian  churches :  What  can  we  do,  ac- 
cepting the  secular  school,  and  so  losing  all  help  in  our 
religious  work  from  the  public  educator,  to  meet  the  re- 
sponsibility that  must  be  thrown  upon  usf  The  answer 
is  found  in  the  exhortations  to  increased  faithfulness  of 
parish  labor  and  the  widening  and  deepening  of  the  edu- 
cation of  our  Sunday-schools.  And  no  doubt  they  can 
do,  they  have  done,  very  nmch.  It  is  well  to  note  that 
all  along  beside  the  growing  secularness  of  the  public 
school  has  gone  on  the  growth  and  steadily  increasing- 
activity  of  the  parish  and  the  Sunday-school. 

No  doubt  they  will  come  up  to  their  work  more  and 
more.  But  I  look,  and  it  is  one  of  the  bright  prospects  of 
the  whole  matter,  to  another  influence,  an  influence  upon 
religion  itself,  from  this  throwing  back  of  responsibil- 
ity upon  its  centers  and  springs.  Too  often  our  churches 
have  taught  some  speculative  or  sentimental  theology  and 
been  satisfied  with  teaching  it,  vaguely  believing  that 
morals,  the  conduct  of  life,  and  practical  religion  were 
taught  somewhere  else.  They  never  went  to  see  what  was 
taught,  but  they  did  not  feel  pressing  upon  themselves 
the  burden  of  the  people's  moral  traiiung  and  its  inspira- 
tion with  religious  life.  If  the  churches  are  made  to  know 
that  burden  for  their  own,  if  they  thus  seek  and  find  a 
theology  more  near  and  real  to  human  life,  if  dogmatic 
narrowness  is  forced  to  expand  to  human  breadth,  and  the 
Christian  religion  is  really  set  to  its  true  task,  which  is 
not  building  churches  and  bewildering  brains,  but  mak- 


THE  PUBLIC-SCHOOL  SYSTEM.  529 

ing  men,  then  the  change  in  our  conception  of  the  school 
which  forced  upon  the  Church  this  larger  sense  of  herself 
and  her  duties  will  certainly  not  be  an  unmixed  evil. 

When  the  nation  is  truly  Christian  the  nation's  schools 
will  be  Christian  without  an  effort  or  an  act  of  any  school 
committee.  Then  a  pervading  religion  will  ilow  through 
education  as  through  every  other  interest.  Until  that 
time  shall  come  it  is  our  task  to  make  the  secular  school 
as  lofty  as  its  nature  will  allow,  and  to  do  what  we  can 
to  increase  in  the  community  that  broad  and  unsectarian 
religious  life  which  the  schools  cannot  but  feel,  and  to 
which,  when  it  becomes  universal,  they  must  submit  them- 
selves. 


LETTERS  OF   TRAVEL. 

By    PHILLIPS    BROOKS. 

14th    Thousand.      Large    12 mo.       392  pages,   cloth,  gilt  top,   $2.00. 
White  cloth,   full  gilt,   with  cloth  cover,   $2.50. 

CONTENTS : 
First  Journey  Abroad.     1S65-1866. 
In    the   Tyrol    and    Switzerland.     1870. 
Summer  in  Northern  Europe.     1872. 
From   London  to  Venice.      1  8  7  4- . 
England  and  the  Continent.     18  7  7. 
In  Paris,  England,  Scotland,  and  Ireland.     1880. 
A  Year  in  Europe  and   India.      1882-1883. 
England  and   Europe.      18  85. 

Across  the  Continent  to  San  Francisco.     18  8  6. 
A  Summer  in  Japan.     1889. 
Summer  of  189  0.     Last  Journey  Abroad. 

"  Few,  if  any,  of  the  books  of  1893  will  attract  or  deserve  more  attention.  The 
volume  embraces  letters  to  his  father,  mother,  brothers  and  other  relatives.  ...  To 
many  of  these  letters  a  peculiar  interest  attaches,  in  that  the  writer  regarded  them 
somewhat  in  the  light  of  a  private  journal,  and,  reclaiming  them  on  his  return,  pre- 
served them  for  the  pleasurable  reminiscences  which  they  awakened.  .  .  .  His 
biography  is  in  course  of  preparation,  but  we  are  confident  that  there  will  be  nothing 
in  it  which  will  more  accurately  reveal  the  grandly  simple  character  of  this  great  man 
than  do  these  letters.  Here  he  opens  his  heart  without  reserve,  and  without  any 
thought  of  being  misunderstood." — Boston  Daily  Advertiser. 

"  We  owe  a  debt  of  gratitude  to  the  family  who  have  consented  thus  to  open  the 
door  and  let  us  sit  by  Phillips  Brooks's  side  and  hear  him  talk  in  familiar  conver- 
sation."—  The  Outlook. 

"  There  could  be  no  better  memorial  of  the  beloved  and  eloquent  preacher  than 
this  volume.  It  is  thoroughly  characteristic  of  the  man,  and  therefore  thoroughly 
delightful.  It  is  full  of  bright  sayings,  kindly  reminiscences  and  gleeful,  even  boyish, 
talk.  Phillips  Brooks  would  never  have  grown  old  had  he  lived  a  hundred  years.  His 
mind  and  heart  were  always  fresh,  and  he  had  such  a  hopeful  way  of  looking  at  things 
that  you  could  not  help  breaking  into  happy  laughter  as  he  talked.  We  have  enjoyed 
the  volume  intensely." — A^.   1".  Herald. 

"  They  abound  in  everything  which  can  make  such  a  compilation  attractive — ■ 
pleasing  scenes  and  incident,  good  company,  a  light,  dignified  and  vivacious  style,  and 
the  strong  personal  charm  of  a  very  unusual  man  driving  the  quill." — The  Independent. 

"  Thousands  will  read  the  letters  with  as  much  eagerness  as  if  they  were  written 
to  themselves." — jV.   V.   Observer. 

"  These  letters  present  a  new  and  winning  side  of  Phillips  Brooks's  character. 
They  prove  that  he  was  at  once  an  acute  and  sympathetic  observer  of  men  and  things, 
that  he  had  a  keen  sense  of  the  ludicrous,  as  well  as  a  large  fund  of  bubbling  and 
spontaneous  humor  ;  and  that  in  spite  of  all  the  honors  that  came  to  him,  his  heart 
remained  as  simple  as  that  of  a  child.  We  know  of  no  letters  to  children  published 
during  the  present  generation  more  delightful  in  every  way  than  those  included  in 
this  volume.  In  flashes  of  unexpected  humor,  and  in  their  genuine  and  unstudied 
humanness,  they  are  charming." — N.  Y.  Tribune. 

"  But  to  cite  all  that  is  pleasant  in  the  book,  all  that  reveals,  without  any  effort  at 
revelation,  what  was  pure  and  kind  and  faithful  in  Bishop  Brooks's  nature,  would  be 
to  cite  the  book  entire.  .  .  .  From  the  first  letter  to  the  last  we  feel  in  the  reading  that 
we  are  learning,  perhaps,  the  most  valuable  side  of  a  valuable  life,  and  that  we  are 
being  shown  the  anchorage  of  that  warm  and  large  heart,  to  which  thousands  did 
honor  after  it  had  ceased  tn  beat,  in  the  narrowing  home  circle  where  Bishop  Brooks 
was  brother,  son,  uncle  and  friend." — N.  Y.    Times. 

"  His  letters  are  a  treat.  .  .  .  They  bring  their  readers  into  a  contact  with  one 
of  the  greatest  souls  of  the  ages — a  contact  which  cannot  fail  to  benefit  any  one  who 
feels  it." — The  Interior  (Chicago). 


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THIRTY-FIRST  THOUSAND. 


Phillips  Brooks  Year  Book. 

SELECTIONS    FROM    THE    WRITINGS    OF   THE 

Rt.    Rev.   PHILLIPS    BROOKS,  D.D. 

By  H.  L.  S.  and  L.  H.  S.     i6mo,  372  pages,  gilt  top,  $1.25. 


"  I  am  so  much  impressed  with  its  wonderful  insight  and  the  spiritual 
fitness  of  the  quotations  that  I  desire  to  express  my  personal  gratitude  to 
the  editors  for  the  spiritual  help  which  they  have  given  to  me  and  to 
thousands  of  others,  by  the  rare  discrimination  and  excellent  taste  which 
they  have  shown  in  their  happy  work.  No  complaint  can  be  made  to  the 
effect  that  this  book  does  not  fairly  represent  Bishop  Brooks.  It  gives 
us  a  great  many  of  his  best  thoughts,  his  communion  with  the  Master,  his 
spiritual  insights,  and  his  highest  aspirations." 

"  One  of  the  richest  and  most  beautiful  books  of  the  year  in  point  of 
contents.  ...  It  would  probably  be  impossible  to  find  in  any  vol- 
ume of  this  size,  drawn  from  distinctively  religious  writings,  a  richer  fer- 
tility of  spiritual  resource  and  intellectual  insight  than  is  to  be  found  in 
these  pages." — The  Outlook. 

"  The  thoughts  are  so  deep  and  grand  and  uplifting,  the  beauty  of  the 
language  so  great,  the  selections  so  varied  and  so  wonderfully  chosen,  and 
the  poetry  as  if  written  for  its  place  in  the  book!  Your  country  owes  you 
a  debt  of  gratitude  for  stringing  the  pearls  and  arranging  the  gems  so  as 
to  bring  out  their  greatest  beauty  and  make  apparent  their  intrinsic 
value." — From  an  English  Letter. 

"In  looking  these  over,  one  is  impressed  that  the  compilers  must  not 
only  have  known  what  was  appropriate  to  select,  but  must  also  have  been 
intimately  acquainted  with  the  great  preacher.  We  see,  even  more  clearly 
than  we  would  in  reading  through  the  complete  volumes  of  his  sermons 
and  lectures,  the  man  and  preacher  himself." — Zion's  Herald, 

' '  The  stuff  out  of  which  the  book  is  mainly  made  is  royal  purple,  and  it  is 
like  the  sound  of  a  trumpet  or  the  rush  of  many  waters,  as  one  opens  his  ear 
to  the  impassioned  voice  that  speaks  in  these  pages." — Atlantic  Monthly. 

"  The  fitness  of  these  passages  is  evident  at  once,  and  it  must  be  con- 
fessed that  this  work,  in  the  beauty  of  its  selections,  in  the  fitness  of  its 
type,  and  in  the  simplicity  of  its  binding,  is  the  beau  ideal  of  what  a  year 
book  ought  to  be.  It  is  as  choice  and  as  delightful  as  one  could  wish. 
Such  a  work  as  this  will  go  into  thousands  of  hands  and  find  immediate 
response,  and  it  is  calculated  to  do  a  great  deal  of  good.  In  it  Bishop 
Brooks  will  still  preach  to  the  multitude,  and  he  will  lead  to  heaven  and 
guide  people  in  the  right  way." — Boston  Herald. 

"  Those  who  have  known  and  loved  Phillips  Brooks,  those  who  have 
listened  to  his  glowing  words  and  seen  his  illumined  face,  and  those  who 
have  merely  been  able  to  trace  his  thought  in  print,  will  take  a  tender 
pleasure  in  turning  the  leaves  of  this  "  Year  Book"  compiled  by  loving 
hands.  It  will  be  a  help  from  day  to  day  ;  for  the  ringing  sentences,  the 
wise  counsellings  and  the  inciting  to  a  higher  life,  strong  in  themselves, 
seem  almost  sacred  now  one  feels  impelled  to  heed  them." 

■ — Boston  Transcript. 

Sent  liy  maily  post-paid^  on  receipt  of  price. 

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By  Bishop   Phillips  Brooks. 

Sermons.     First  Series. 

25th  Thousand.      i2mo.      20  Sermons.     380  pages.      Cloth,  $1.75. 
Paper,  50  cents. 
"  Humanity,  and  not  sectarianism,  is  built  up  by  such  sermons  as  these.     Mr.  Broolis  is 
a  man  preaching  to  men  about  the  struggles  and  triumphs  of  men." — N.  )'.  Tribune. 

"  We  emphatically  apprise  our  readers  that  if  they  overlook  this  volume  they  will 
miss  some  of  the  freshest,  most  fervent,  most  truthful,  most  quickening,  most  comfort- 
ing and  helping  religious  discourses  which  life  is  likely  to  bring  them.  If  all  preaching 
were  to  be  like  this  how  we  should  all  wish  that  great  were  the  company  of  preachers." 

— Literary  IV or  id. 

Sermons.     Second  Series. 

The  Candle  of  the  Lord,  etc.     20th  Thousand.     21  Sermons. 
378  pages.     Cloth,  $1.75     Paper,  50  cents. 
"Dr.  Brooks  is  wonderfully  suggestive   in   opening   men's   thoughts   in   directions 
which  give  to  life  fresh  meanings." — .V.  V.  Times, 

Sermons  Preached  in  English  Churches.     Third  Series. 

I2th  Thousand.      14  Sermons.     320  pages.     Cloth,  $1.75.      Paper, 

50  cents. 
"He  has  a  message  to  deliver,  it  is  from  God  ;   he  believes  in  its  reality,  and  he 
delivers  it  earnestly  and  devoutly,  and  his  hearers  catch  the  enthusiasm  of  his  own 
faith." — Churchman. 

Twenty  Sermons.     Fourth  Series. 

I2th  Thousand.     378  pages.     Cloth,  $1.75.     Paper,  50  cents. 
"  Mr.  Brooks  brings  to  the    pulpit  the  mind  of  a  poet  and  the  devout   heart  of  a 
Christian,  with  a  very  large  and  generous  human  personality." — Independent. 

The  Light  of  the  World,  and  Other  Sermons.     Fifth  Series. 

I2th  Thousand.     21  Sermons.     382  pages.     Cloth,  $1.75.     Paper, 

50  cents. 
"  Because  he  reveals  to  men  with  force  and  beauty  their  true  and  deeper  selves, 
meant  for  all  good  and  right  things.  Dr.  Brooks  preaches  a  word  which  they  ever 
rejoice  to  hear,  and  having  heard,  can  never  go  away  unprofited.     His  larger  parish 
will  cordially  welcome  these  twenty-one  sermons." — Literary  World. 

Sermons.     Sixth  Series. 

7th  Thousand.     i2mo.     20  Sermons.     368  pages.     Cloth,  $1.75. 

"  How  shall  we  describe  these  twenty  sermons  ?  They  take  the  old  stories  told  in  the 
Hebrew  narratives  and  fill  them  with  a  life  that  throbs  and  glows  with  the  breath  and 
blood  of  to-day.  Simplicity  and  power  seem  to  be  the  attributes  of  this  preacher.  .  .  . 
Gladly  we  welcome  this  new  vial  containing  the  life-blood  of  a  master  spirit." 

—  The  Critic. 

"  These  sermons,  in  their  spirituality  of  temper,  their  breadth  of  sympathy,  their 
insight,  and  their  beautiful  literary  quality,  are  quite  on  a  level  vi^ith  any  earlier  ser- 
mons from  the  same  hand.  .  .  .  Like  its  predecessors  it  is  full  not  only  of  consola- 
tion, but  also  of  spiritual  stimulus." — The  Outlook. 


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LECTURES  ON  PREACHING. 

Delivered  before  the  Divinity  School  of  Yale  College  in  January 
and  February,  1877. 

By  the  Rev.  PHILLIPS    BROOKS. 

Twelfth  Thousand.     i2mo,  281  pages    .     .     ,    ^i.jo. 


"  Unlike  Robertson,  Phillips  Brooks  continually  reminds  us  of  him.  He  has  the  same 
analytical  power  ;  the  same  broad  human  sympathy ;  the  same  keen  knowledge  of  human 
nature,  toned  and  tempered  and  made  the  more  true  by  his  sympathies;  the  same  mys- 
terious and  indefinable  element  of  divine  life,  so  that  his  messagje  comes  with  a  guast 
authority,  wholly  unecclesiastical,  purely  personal ;  and  the  same  undertone  of  sadness, 
the  same  touch  of  pathos,  speaking  low  as  a  man  who  is  saddened  by  his  own  seeming 
success,  — a  success  which  is  to  his  thought,  and  in  comparison  with  his  ideals,  a  failure. 
No  minister  can  read  carefully  these  lectures  without  getting  a  profounder  sense  of  the 
true  gra  ideur  of  his  work,  and  a  clearer  conception  of  at  least  some  of  the  secrets  of 
success  in  its  prosecution."  —  Harper's  I\Iazazine. 

No  one  in  our  country  has  had  more  continuous  or  more  conspicuous  success  11. 
preaching  than  Mr.  Brooks;  and  the  book  he  has  given  us  points  directly  to  the  princi- 
ples which  underlie  his  power.  No  one  can  read  it  and  go  on  repeating  the  proverb,  'as 
dry  as  a  sermon,'  if  only  sermons  shall  be  conceived  and  delivered  in  the  moral  and  in- 
tellectual atmosphere  with  which  these  lectures  surround  the  subject. 

"The  teaching  in  these  lectures  is  of  necessity  full  of  vitality.  It  is  to  be  compared  net 
so  much  to  a  treatise  on  tactics  or  an  exhortaiion  to  enlist,  as  to  a  strain  of  martial 
music  inspiring  the  enthusiasm  of  a  soldier.  It  is  withal  very  noble  and  very  genuine 
No  theological  student  could  ever  read  it  and  doubt  that  character  lav  at  the  bottom  of 
his  success.  Full  of  inspiring  suggestions  as  it  is,  no  one  could  glean  from  it  any  comfort 
in  trusting  to  inspirations  and  neglecting  work  and  study."  —  Scribtiers  Monthly. 

"The  enthusiasm  for  the  profession  which  this  book  displays  has  contagion  in  it,  be- 
cause it  is  not  expended  on  that  which  separates  the  profession  from  other  occupations, 
but  on  that  which  it  shares  with  them.  Throughout  the  book  runs  a  single  thought  nevei 
lost  sight  of,  —  the  greater  the  man  the  greater  the  preacher;  and  again  and  again,  when 
discoursing  of  practical  methods,  the  lecturer  returns  in  some  form  to  his  golden  text,  that 
it  is  the  man  behind  the  sermon  which  makes  the  sermon  a  power.  It  is  because  the 
lecturer,  holding  this  truth  firmly,  addresses  himself  to  the  living  facts  of  a  preacher's 
profession  rather  than  to  the  mechanism  or  elaborate  organization  in  which  he  works,  that 
his  words  will  be  life  to  the  living  and  glittering  generalities  to  the  moribund."  —  Atlantic 
Monthly. 

"  We  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that  they  are  of  more  practical  value  than  any  work  of  the 
sort  we  have  ever  seen It  is  a  book  to  be  read  for  the  feeling  it  awakens,  but  feel- 
ing so  lofty  that  it  is  one  with  wisdom  and  truth."  —  Literary  World, 

"  Nothing  of  the  kind  can  be  superior  to  his  first  four  lectures  They  might  be  truly 
described  as  an  analysis  of  the  elements  of  Christian  manliness,  and  as  a  statement  of  the 
conditions  on  which  men  who  preach  can  hope  to  win  other  men.  Nearly  every  page  con- 
tains something  over  which  the  reader  lingers  with  delight." —  New  York  Times. 

"  No  man,  lay  or  clerical,  who  likes  bright  thoughts  and  clear,  artistic  expression,  can 
afford  to  neglect  this  volume." —  A'eiv  i'ork  Sun. 

"  There  is  a  noble  breadth  and  height  and  depth  to  each  of  these  lectures.  They  are 
both  roomy  and  full.  Of  all  the  courses  which  have  been  given  on  this  foundation,  we 
remember  none  that  are  more  vital,  fresh,  and  inspiring.  One  does  not  need  to  be  a  mini 
Ister  to  read  them  with  great  satisfaction  and  great  improvement."  —  Boston  Advertiser 

"  It  would  be  ver7  easy  to  fill  columns  with  fresh,  sagacious,  subtile,  true  observation:: 
from  these  pages."  —  Boston  Evenitt^  Tra>iscript. 


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E.  P.  DUTTON  &  CO.,  Publishers, 

31  West  230  Street,  New  York. 


By  the  Rev.  Phillips  Brooks,  D.D. 

THE  INFLUENCE   OF  JESUS. 

The  Bohlen  Lectures  for  1879.  Fourteenth  Thousand.  i6mo. 
274  pages.      Cloth,  $1.25. 

Lecture         I.     The  Influence  of  Jesus  on  the  Moral  Life  of  Man. 
"  n.     The  Influence  of  Jesus  on  the  Social  Life  of  Man. 

"  III,     The  Influence  of  Jesus  on  the  Emotional  Life  of  Man. 

"  IV.     The  Influence  of  Jesus  on  the  Intellectual  Life  of  Man. 

"  It  is  written  with  an  open  heart  toward  the  thousands  who  are  seeking  to  find 
the  secret  of  the  fascination  which  men  have  in  Christ  as  Man,  and  will  be  welcomed 
in  much  the  same  quarters  as  those  in  which  '  Ecce  Homo '  found  a  hearing  ten  years 
ago.  It  is  a  strong  and  healthy  book,  which  has  grown  out  of  the  life  of  a  strong  and 
healthy  man." — A',  i'.    Times. 

"  The  ringing  keynote  is  the  Fatherhood  of  God  to  all  mankind,  the  favorite  idea 
of  this  distinguished  preacher,  and  one  which  he  here  develops  with  all  his 
characteristic  energy,  eloquence   and   hopefulness." — The  Literary  World. 

TOLERANCE. 

Two  Lectures  addressed  to  the  Students  of  Several  of  the  Divinity 
Schools  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church.  Fourth  Thousand. 
i6mo.     III  pages.     Paper,  50  cents ;  cloth,  75  cents. 

"  Mr.  Brooks's  two  lectures  in  eloquence,  sweetness,  and  literary  charm  are  what 
he  always  is  when  at  all  equal  to  himself.  For  their  substance  they  lay  down  a 
doctrine  of  tolerance  which  would  at  a  touch  bring  all  sections  of  Christendom 
together  on  the  basis  of  a  tolerance  which  carries  in  it  the  promise  of  spiritual 
unity." — Independent. 

"  They  are  marked  by  the  broad  and  catholic  spirit  of  Dr.  Brooks,  and  are  to  be 
commended  to  all  students,  and  with  especial  earnestness  to  seekers  after  the  unity 
and  union  of  Christians." — -V.  1'.  Observer, 

"  It  is  a  book  for  large-minded  men  and  women  of  whatever  creed  or  no  creed.  .  .  . 
To  appreciate  these  lectures  fully  they  should  be  read  from  the  first  line  to  the  last. 
One  clear-cut  and  finely  polished  sentence  follows  another  in  such  natural  sequence, 
illustrating  each  the  other,  that  they  form  a  harmonious  and  inseparable  whole." 

— Home  Joti  rnal. 

"  In  this  his  latest  contribution  to  religious  thought  the  eloquent  Rector  of  Trinity 
Church  appears  at  his  best.  The  subject  he  has  chosen,  equally  with  his  mode  of 
treating  it,  are  characteristic  of  the  man." — -V.  Y.   Times. 

BAPTISM   AND   CONFIRMATION. 

Fifteenth  Thousand.      Paper,   lo  cents. 

THE  GOOD  WINE  AT  THE  FEAST'S  END. 

A  Sermon  on  Cirowing  Old.     Paper,  25  cents. 

A  CHRISTMAS  SERMON. 

Paper,  25  cents. 

AN  EASTER    SERMON, 

Paper,  25  cents. 

THE  SYMMETRY  OF  LIFE. 

An  Address  to  Young  Men.      Paper,  25  cents. 

THE  LIFE  HERE  AND  THE    LIFE  HEREAFTER. 

In  attractive  paper  covers.     25  cents. 


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